Jonas Ackerlund's SPUN leaves you feeling dirty, breathless, scuzzy, and like you've just watched a parade of every single facet of Chrystal meth addiction unfold in front of you like a horrible carnival of lost souls and ruined lives. It's a hard flick to sit through, but there's a brutal poetry and gutter stained beauty to the characters lives, and the events that unfold are a nonsensical, dizzying merry go around of calamity, confusion and speed addled insanity. It's my personal favourite film of about drug addiction ever made. Jason Schwartzman plays Ross, whose mission in life is to score the next hit. After a delirious opening sequence set to a calming rendition of Number Of The Beast, he arrives at the home of Spider Mike. John Leguizamo has never had a shortage of energy, and here he lets the ripcord fly off the handle, handling his role like a squirrel stuck in a vat of distiller caffeine, bouncing off every wall in sight and chewing the scenery like a plastic straw. Mena Suvari plays his equally addicted girlfriend Cookie. Brittney Murphy bring surprising depth to her role as a girl who Ross strikes a friendship with. The two of them eventually find their way to the house of The Cook, played by Mickey Rourke. From there the film heads down a scum encrusted rabbit hole of nonsensical run ins, hapless failures and an eventual rock bottom inevitability where every character finds themselves at a place where if they go any further with their lifestyle, there's no return. Rourke finds the emotional anchor in an otherwise manic roster, and even though he's off the wall for much of the film, he has a monologue in the eleventh hour that grounds his role in tragic regret. Very underrated performance from him. Murphy balances the ditsy slut aspects with a maternal yearning for something better than the road she went down. There's a whole rats nest of other assorted characters and cameos running around, from Peter Stormare's aggressive, hilarious narc, to Patrick Fugit's grotesque Frisbee, to Debbie Harry is from Blondie fame as a nosy feminazi. Even Eric Roberts shows up for a brief reunion with Rourke. The film has a heavily stylized, go for broke attitude that pushes the boundaries of what movies have been able to do, in the best way possible. It shows you not from an outsiders perspective what it might be like to observe people on this drug, but gives you a very intimate, non judgmental day in the lives of these manic, lost soul pixies, ghosts of their former selves, enslaved in the mania and constant need for a fix that is their own design. If you can handle this sort of stuff and like the sub genre (Trainspotting, Requiem For A Dream, The Salton Sea etc) then this is a heavy hitting visual and auditory blast of pure experimental cinema, and a total joy to watch. Just bring a barf bag.
Review of Spun
