Smug Spun Showcases Speed, Sex and Style
By Kate Brokaw
Staff Writer

Nothing is understated in Spun, Jonas Akerlund's sped-up, music video-esque drug movie, but nothing is particularly likable, either. Tracing three days and nights in the lives of a bunch of glamorously grungy speed freaks, Akerlund- the Swedish director made famous for his controversial music video for Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up"- spares no measure in creating a series of dizzyingly cut, increasingly nasty locales in which his cast of characters can snort drugs and have sex. Spun is sort of mesmerizingly trashy, in its own seedy-midnight-cult-flick kind of way. But ultimately, no amount of stylish editing and stunt casting can make up for the lack of any real substance or narrative drive; it's a kinetically disturbing filmgoing experience that uses creative technique to hide its own emptiness.

What suffices for a plotline goes something like this: meth addict Ross (Jason Schwartzman, oh-so-far from his days as Rushmore's Max Fischer) can't get his usual fix from low-level dealer Spider Mike (an expectedly hyper John Leguizamo) and his girlfriend Cookie (Mena Suvari, all nervous tics and rotten teeth). While still in their mold-encrusted house of filth, he meets flirty floozy Nikki (Brittany Murphy); offering to help him out, she takes Ross back to a dingy motel room where her boyfriend (a fantastically pimped-out Mickey Rourke), known as the Cook, spends his days scientifically preparing new batches of speed. In exchange for a constant supply of drugs, Ross agrees to run errands for the pair- buying supplies with the Cook one day, bringing Nikki's sick green dog to the vet the next.

This is the episodic structure that comprises most of Spun: stylistic, jittery scenes that try to emulate the highs and lows of drug addiction, but also get more nasty and over-the-top as they go along. Fast-paced, drug-addled scenes vary with occasionally slow, oddly serene car rides, as an acceptably pretty score by Billy Corgan takes over the soundtrack. Backgrounds are all bleached out, and nothing is shot at a normal angle. Apparently trying to both emulate and outdo Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream, Akerlund also uses similar rapid-edit montages throughout Spun: with 4,500 cuts, or an average of one per second, this is not a film to watch after a few cups of coffee.

And as in Requiem, where a series of single shots- needle, bloodstream, dilating pupil- accompanied each high, everything in Spun is made up of the sum of its parts. But here there's no limit to the constant back-and-forth between long shots and close-ups: we see both the different parts of Ross's car as it starts up, just as we see the disgusting pimples on local kid Frisbee's (Patrick Fugit) face. And to a certain extent this technique remains somewhat visually stunning- you can't take it all in, but you also can't take your eyes off the sensory assault of the screen.

The problem is that Spun just seems so damn satisfied with itself, so pleased with its graphic outrageousness, that at a certain point everything just becomes cartoonish. Certainly, you've at least got to appreciate the sheer gall of a film that features an explicit sex scene between Jason Schwartzman and a blonde stripper, intercut with an even more explicit cartoon rendering of the scene, and Debbie Harry- yes, Debbie Harry- listening in from the next room. But by the time meth-addicted cops have Frisbee try to break into his dealer's house while inside Nikki is graphically constipated and Spider Mike is masturbating furiously into a sock, the movie has become too ridiculously over-the-top to be taken seriously. And at a certain point, even the technique becomes predictable- the only thing Akerlund has left to do is to slow down.

And Spun does slow down by the end, as all of its characters descend predictably into desperation. But no moralistic edge the film takes on at this point can be successful after everything that has already played out. All of Spun's unpleasantness and vulgarity is tinged with a sort of dingy glamour, and so the offhand tenderness that Akerlund attempts in the final reel seems out of place. When Nikki, in a drugged-out haze, starts talking about the child she lost, none of her words have any of the emotional gravity that they should. And the perfect ex-girlfriend that the far-gone Ross is trying to win back is predictably dream-like and dismissive.

A friend of mine remarked that the entirety of Spun felt like a one huge beginning; indeed, nothing really happens in the film to make you feel much of anything for its characters, the most likable of whom duct-tapes a woman to a bed for three days. Comparably, Requiem for a Dream is a film that never loses its grip on the heartbreaking nature of reality, even when the last half-hour cedes into anti-drug didacticism. But it's also a good example of how technique can contribute to storytelling rather than overwhelm it. Spun does incite some level of dark enjoyment and visual appreciation, but most of is just too low and nasty to really matter in the end. And yet this seems to be the nihilistic nature of the film: in the world of these frenetically drugged-out addicts, a good high is all about style.