Kicking the habit

Vondie Curtis Hall's Gridlock'd takes a number of staple Hollywood elements - buddy movie, chase film - and gives them a modest shake-up. Two junkies called Spoon and Stretch make a New Year's resolution to kick their habit, not because 1 January has a special significance for them, but because that is the day their room-mate Cookie overdoses and has to be taken to hospital. Cookie was not only their room-mate but girlfriend of at least one of them, as well as being the vocalist of their jazz-rap trio. She was also the sensible one of the three - the one who could be relied on to pay the rent - and she normally steered clear of hard drugs. She overdosed on her first hit.

Gridlock'd isn't didactic about drugs, but it can't be accused of doing the glamour thing. It's acknowledged in the film that taking drugs soon stops being an escape and turns into a job, a dismal job. Where the issue gets complicated is when a society that declares war on drugs makes it difficult for people even to make a truce with their addiction. All the help that agencies offer takes at least six weeks to kick in. Even an HIV diagnosis, which gets you on to the fast track, only speeds things up a little. Gridlock'd is consistently entertaining, but it's pretty unsparing about the interlocking hells of detox, welfare, Medicaid. It's so much easier to get another hit than to break out of the downward spiral of need.

Spoon is played by Tupac Shakur, who was killed aged 25 before the film was released. His performance in Gridlock'd is likeable and even rather accomplished technically. While the two friends are waiting for their next institutional rejection, he delivers a speech about his first drug experience, aged 16, that is the closest thing in Hall's screenplay to a sentimental moment ("That shit was like going back to the womb ... I was home") and keeps it from cloying. His character is the more responsible and conciliatory of the two, and the one who first decides to kick his habit. Of course, responsibility is a rather tenuous notion in this context. Spoon gets his nickname from his ritual choice of utensil for cooking dope. People can talk all they like about the superior heat-conducting qualities of, say, a medicine bottle top, but no way is he going to meddle with aluminium. That stuff can give you "Old-Timers" (that's Alzheimer's).

His friend, Stretch, played by Tim Roth, is more of a loser's loser. He has an unerring knack for knowing when that extra word, that final unnecessary insult, will create disaster. In most films that feature a cross-racial friendship, it's usually the case that the black character is an honorary white. In Gridlock'd, this pattern is reversed, with Stretch inhabiting a non-white milieu - by which I mean not the world of drugs but of rap music, even of the jazzy non-confrontational sort we hear on the soundtrack. Stretch actually seems to think he is black, to judge by his presumptuous use of the word "nigger" while addressing some of Spoon's friends, which earns him an exasperated rebuke ("You can't be calling me nigger in front of other black people").

At other times, the two of the them are not above exploiting the dynamics of race. When a black security guard tells Stretch to put his cigarette out - it's true the No Smoking sign is right behind him - he simply passes the offending cigarette to Spoon, knowing that the guard will find it much harder to enforce regulations with a brother. Stretch is dependent on Spoon in a way that is touching when it's not annoying - like when he orders "the same" as Spoon from a hot dog vendor, only "with nothing" on it instead of everything. In other words, a completely different order, except that it pleases Stretch to think of them doing stuff alike. Their body language in the hospital, while they wait for news of Cookie's condition, expresses their relationship, with Stretch prone to curl up and rest against his stabler and more wakeful friend.

Every now and then, Hall's film flashes back - the transition's marked by the image being shown in negative - to the triumphant New Year's Eve gig that may be the last time the three friends make music (the film doesn't pretend that junkies are completely unable to function). The action of the film, a series of disastrous encounters accompanied by a progressive loss of control over events, amounts to a black comedy of thwarted detox, like a remake of After Hours without the original feeling of security. Minor characters have a life of their own, like the woman at a rehab centre who screams demands at the staff, but chats amicably with other people in the line. The film's view of character is bleak but not ungenerous: there's no suggestion that she's faking her desperation, just that she's separating it from her need to chat.

Two encounters have repercussions, one with a pair of gangsters - one black, one white - whom the heroes cheat and then accidentally rob, the other with a blind Vietnam vet who gives Spoon a spare ticket when he's slept past the calling of his original number (the vet always takes an extra one for Nixon, his seeing-eye dog). The gangsters, whose numberplate reads D-REPER, function as avenging angels, while the blind vet intervenes more than once on the heroes' behalf, without necessarily knowing he's doing it. The film builds to an extraordinary scene in which we learn just how far Spoon and Stretch will go to be admitted to a programme.

American movies are normally so self-conscious (perhaps independent ones most of all) that it's good to be able to report that Tim Roth in Gridlock'd - Tim Roth, who did most of the cinema's unforgettable bleeding in Reservoir Dogs - can say "it feels like I'm bleeding to death", without making an audience think of the actor rather than the character.

On occasion, Vondie Curtis Hall's writing and directing come together to produce quietly daring effects. How often does it happen that one of a film's heroes tells the other he is HIV positive ("I'd have mentioned it before but I didn't know how you'd take it")? He never shares his "works", but still, it's a big thing. In Gridlock'd, this conversation takes place in a brief lull in the action, and isn't dwelt on. Not only that, but we don't see either of the men's faces at this critical moment - just their shoes showing beneath the toilet doors behind which they're hiding (one of them, as we know, is just now fixing up, for all his good intentions). Roth and Shakur have done enough work in the rest of the film for us to supply the details here, without even realising we're doing itn

On release from tomorrow