The trouble with films is that they need a narrative. The trouble with drugs is that they have absolutely no narrative at all. Almost by definition, they don't go anywhere, or do anything. They're just a sensation, a piece of private chemistry. There are only three possible endings to a drugs story; either you get clean, or you get busted, or you die.

From Hunter S Thompson to Easy Rider, Ken Kesey to Trainspotting, there's no shortage of writers and directors wanting to pin down on paper, or celluloid, exactly how it feels to get stoned. It's an uphill struggle; you don't have to murder someone to find a film about killers interesting, but you do have to take drugs in order to find drug films even remotely watchable. Most directors either get sensible and pick a better subject, or narrow down their audience to a bunch of adolescent stoners, or chemical bores.

The drug of choice in Spun is speed and the chosen filmic technique appropriately veryveryfastindeed, except in the post-high moments when ... everything ... is ... really ... really ... s-l-o-w

The basics of plot, character, theme and method are set up even before the opening credits roll. There's a bunch of young, small town, trailer park Americans doing methamphetamine. They have a guy called The Cook, who, well, cooks to supply them. Sometimes they go out, but mostly they stay in.

Later, the film scrolls through the familiarities of all small town American films: motels, strip joints, highways, porn shops, grossly obese women watching trash TV, Fargo-esque cops with bad hair and a tendency to shoot the wrong people, WalMarts, supermarkets, and then back to the motel again.

If this all sounds a little weary, that's because Spun never tells you anything you didn't know already, either about drugs, or about America. What it does with some success is to render the sensation of speed as accurately as one can do without handing out doggy bag courtesy grams to the audience.

Jonas Akerlund is an erstwhile pop video director and it shows. The music is great, the cinematography wonderful and he manages to mix in animation and Seventies cop show references without it ever becoming dull, or self-referential.

It's also entertaining to see Mena Suvari - the pristine, pretty one in American Beauty - as a snot-nosed junkie, and kind of interesting watching Mickey Rourke go back to playing The Man. And, to begin with, it's good to get the sweaty, knife-edge energy of speed pinned up on the screen. But after the 17th hit, the 17th rush, the 17th shot of the motel, or the strip-joint, the high begins to fade.

In the end, you get the feeling that Spun is a clever, cool and completely meaningless piece of moviemaking. Like its title and its protagonists, it all just ends up turning in circles.