Watching Spun is the strangest experience I have had in a while.
Let's see now, there is a bunch of acne-spotted, unwashed, speed freaks in mossy teeth and bruises, taking enormous volumes of drugs.
There is a protagonist by the name of Ross (Jason Schwartzman) who is mostly normal but sometimes not. He leaves a girl tied up on his bed for three days. Think that's bad? He also tapes her eyes shut so she can see nothing, tapes her mouth shut so nobody will hear her scream, and -- oh, the worst kind of sadism, this -- leaves a heavy metal CD stuck on one riff for all the time that he is gone.
And Ross is the good guy.
There is the stripper, Nikki (Brittany Murphy), whose dog turns green from inhaling too much methamphetamine that her sugar daddy boyfriend cooks up.
There is the boyfriend, known only as The Cook (Mickey Rourke), who sees women as little more than body parts. He discourses at length on the finer points, so to speak, of pornography while stroking the gun strapped to his hip.
There is Spider Mike (John Lequizamo), a small-time meth dealer who is so paranoid, he routinely turns on his friends.
There is his girlfriend Cookie (Mena Suvari), whose time in the bathroom is documented in too much detail, the camera watching as she strains in constipated agony.
You may think this cruddy cast of misfits and freaks constitutes a sort of losers' parade. You would be wrong. Though they cannot be accused of glamorising drugs, they are nowhere near as gross as the thumbnails sketches above would have you believe.
Every time one of the characters in Spun snorts or shoots a hit of speed, the camera kicks into hyper-realistic stop-start MTV mode; the manic depressive soundtrack by Billy Corgan, formerly of the Smashing Pumpkins, erupts and there are extreme close-ups of wired eyeballs and puckered skin.
The film's production notes tell us it began as a 1,000-page storyboard comic and eventually had 4,500 edits, which makes almost a cut a second, qualifying the movie for the Guinness Book of Records. The enormous number of edits gives viewers the visceral experience of a tweak freak's sleepless, frenetic day.
Swedish director Jonas Akerlund is known mainly for hip music videos. He made the clips for Prodigy's Smack my b*&^% up and Madonna's Ray of light, and is clearly a fan of earlier junkie movies like Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy, especially Darren Aronofsky's almost unbearable Requiem For A Dream.
But Akerlund's chief achievement is in making his unsavoury characters people the viewer begins, reluctantly, to like. Rourke's cowboy, in particular, swaggers through the movie like an incarnation of evil machismo. But, by the end of the proceedings, you begin to admire his charisma and anti-hero charm.
I suspect the director did, too. When Rourke -- resplendent in white trash glory right down to cowboy boots, white Stetson and pistol -- finally calls it quits, so does Spun.
Until then, it is a white-knuckle ride to the edge of town. I liked it in a sick and twisted sort of way.