Ross (Jason Schwartzman) is a meth-head with a stripper girlfriend (Chloe Hunter) who, after meeting the maker of his meth, Cook (Mickey Rourke), is enlisted as chauffer to him and his stripper girlfriend, Nikki (Brittany Murphy). Three days, a couple of explosions, a bowel movement, a stripper tied to a bed, a few animations, masturbations, and animated masturbations later, Spun teeters to a stop like a broken carnival ride you wish had ended a couple of hours ago. Flashing by on this burnt highway are carbuncular Frisbee (Patrick Fugit) and his morbidly obese and naked mother (Lisa Brounstein, doing a mean Edith Massey); John Leguizamo as John Leguizamo (hyperactive and pesty); flamboyantly fey drug boss Eric Roberts; and, of course, Ron Jeremy as a bartender (ask for all drinks shaken, not stirred).

There's a moment in D.J. Caruso's own tweaker noir The Salton Sea where junkies on a speed bender emerge from a heavily shuttered den to find themselves surprised by sunlight. In one literal flash, the vertigo of drug-induced sleeplessness comes clear to the fore--an idea that Spun, by comparison, forwards with dozens of mindless camera tricks, quick cuts, and, worse, dialogue like "I haven't slept for days." Unused to narrative, Åkerlund tells his story in epileptic bursts and then is compelled to allow dialogue to recap and narrate. Åkerlund also makes the cardinal mistake of trusting a spastic cast that, with the arguable exception of Schwartzman, has never proven itself trustworthy to work without direction. (Some, like Leguizamo, have actually shown themselves dangerously unreliable without a strong hand at the tiller.) An aborted lovemaking scene between Leguizamo and a teeth-blacked Mena Suvari (with Debbie Harry's bull dyke sex talk operator on the line) is one of those things to which people refer when citing "last straws" and moments immediately preceding escape into the lobby.

Ultimately, what fails about Spun isn't its storytelling incompetence and the frenetic overreaching of its inexperienced cast, but the fact that it says almost nothing about addiction while saying a lot about how much fun it looks like to be a beautiful young actor playing "dress down" in a message movie. The technical aspects of the piece end up being the only thing discussed about the piece--making the star of the film not its story nor its characters, but its hyperactivity and, of course, its over-similarity to Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream. Spun is self-aggrandizing babble about nothing in particular, a picture that takes aim at the heart of a genuine malady and makes a music video out of it in all its slickified mock pretension, beautiful bodies, and guilty titillation.-Walter Chaw