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"A Scanner Darkly" is Philip K. Dick's deceptively obtuse title for Richard Linklater's haunting cautionary tale of paranoia and madness.

After faltering artistically with a couple of commercial duds ("School of Rock," the "Bad News Bears" remake), Linklater reaffirms himself as one of the vital creative forces of modern cinema with this dark, psychotic masterpiece based on Dick's own harrowing experiences with drug addiction. This thoughtful, disturbing adaptation of one of the author's most personal works is a film anyone who's ever endured the horror of addiction should see.

Like George Orwell a generation before him, Dick's stories were a reflection of the time in which he wrote them, hiding in plain sight as tales of future dystopia. "A Scanner Darkly" is set "seven years from now" in Orange County, Calif., when America obviously has lost the War on Drugs.

Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves) is among the foot soldiers, working as a sheriff's department narc under the cover of a "Scramble Suit" - a full-body encasement that projects a bewildering series of images and allows the wearer to become "the quintessential everyman," completely unidentifiable because he has no memorable identity.

His job is to ferret out suppliers of "Substance D," a powerful psychotropic that has some 20 percent of the population addicted. Arctor is one of them, and is in fact a target of his own investigation - which remains unknown to his superiors since he's afforded the anonymity of the "Scramble Suit" they also wear. A quasi-religious recovery group called New Path offers rehab to brain-damaged users with the government's blessing, but are they a part of the solution or part of the problem?

Bob shares a house with a hilariously oddball assortment of paranoid losers and psychologically impaired nutjobs in various stages of self-destruction under the drug, including Barris (Robert Downey Jr.), whose acidic wit and rationalizing skills front a dangerous sociopath; Ernie (Woody Harrelson), a burned-out but essentially likeable stoner; and Donna (Winona Ryder), Arctor's dealer and quasi-girlfriend, who claims her pathological fear of bodily contact is a by-product of her cocaine habit. The most visibly troubled is Freck (Rory Cochrane), an unwashed junkie whom we meet in the pre-title sequence as he's overtaken by a swarm of aphids - actual or imagined, we don't yet know.

Though Charlie Kaufman wrote an earlier adaptation of Dick's novel, and Terry Gilliam tried for years to get a project off the ground, the project fell into the right hands with Linklater, the chronicler of post-adolescent aimlessness behind "Slacker" and "Dazed and Confused." He made the brilliant decision to render this film in the interpolated rotoscoping technique created by Bob Sabiston (first used in 2001's "Waking Life"), layering Shane F. Kelly's digital photography with animation to create a dreamlike quality that leaves us to wonder if what we're seeing is a Lovecraftian nightmare that's become real, or just a distorted perception from a character's drug-impaired psyche.

Rotoscoping, the bizarre animation technique that overlays live-action footage with graphic embellishment, isn't just a gimmick as Linklater applies it here. As in "Waking Life," the mise-en-scene of cartoon realism is absolutely necessary, allowing the filmmaker a freedom unadorned live action would not. The nebulous lines and often disorienting movements heighten the surrealism this material demands, and illustrate exaggerated emotions and expressions that wouldn't work with just an actor in front of the camera.

Linklater's technique also reveals some pleasant surprises - notably Reeves, who turns in his best work to date for this film. Though it's tempting to revel in the irony that a rotoscoped Keanu Reeves is better than the real thing, his casting as Arctor is an advantage. An actor whose persona is a blank is just right for a character we must follow on an initially bewildering, often quite amusing, and finally harrowing evolution from a conflicted pawn in a Kafkaesque game, to a soul lost in paranoia, to basket case.

Anyone unfamiliar with the canon of Dick's quirky, literate fantasy might not sense the impending hopelessness or the profound Orwellian overtones as they creep into Linklater's script.

But even avid fans of the sci-fi icon might be blind-sided by the third act after spending an hour with Linklater's memorably eccentric characters and electric dialogue. Though we're sufficiently aware that "Substance D" leads to sustained psychosis after heavy use, it's easy to get caught in the often hysterical pretzel-logic ramblings of Barris, the drug-addled but sweetly benign protests of Ernie, the perverse rationale that leads to the building of homemade silencers and steers a simple conversation between friends into a potentially lethal episode.

While "Waking Life" achieved its greatness in thoughtful abstraction (Linklater based the film on images and thoughts he remembered from lucid dreaming), the brilliance of "A Scanner Darkly" is in its determined method to make sense of the madness - framing Dick's political paranoia with intense, character-driven psychological trauma as a plea for mankind to reverse the course of its self-destruction.

Is a man tucking a blue flower in his boot a sign of hope, or simply a former junkie with severe neurological damage saving "a gift for a friend at Thanksgiving" because he thinks it's pretty?

That "A Scanner Darkly" won't tell you which might be its finest achievement of all.

"A Scanner Darkly" is showing at The Rose, 1250 SSW Loop 323. Call 903-592-7000 for show times.

Jonathan Perry is Arts & Entertainment editor. He can be reached at 903.596.6301. e-mail: jrperry@tylerpaper.com