Back in 1984, two of Hollywood's most promising young actor/rebels went head to head in The Pope of Greenwich Village, a middling movie at best, but one that nevertheless generated a frisson thanks to the work of Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts. Things went pretty much into the tank for both of them as time went by-Roberts got into drugs and made a zillion B movies while Rourke went a bit nuts, retired from acting, took up boxing and had facial plastic surgery. The bizarre, if brief, reunion of the two former icons of cool is just one of the methamphetamine-fuelled pleasures in the bleak and black comedy Spun, music video director Jonas Akerlund's debut feature.

Rourke is "The Cook," a white-trash cowboy who spends all his time in a seedy motel room cooking up methamphetamine and promising to eventually, maybe, get around to servicing his permanently high girlfriend Nikki (Brittany Murphy). Rushmore's Jason Schwartzman, in an effective bid to change his nerdy image, plays the lead as nice-guy Ross, a shaggy haired, ex-girlfriend-obsessed speed addict who somehow ends up as a driver for "The Cook" and Nikki. He chauffeurs them to various appointments with drug dealer Spider Mike (John Leguizamo), a veterinarian (Nikki's dog turns green after some unspecified accident), the strip club where Nikki works and the local convenience store. He is paid with endless grams of methamphetamine.

Taking place over a four-day span, during which time none of the principals gets a wink of sleep thanks to the constant snorting of meth, Spun (the term refers to the freaked-out, coming-down period at the end of a speed jag) positively revels in it's grungy, drug-fuelled milieu and its slacker-losers, all of whom have only two interests: getting high and having sex. And they do plenty of both-one of the film's bleaker jokes has Ross handcuffing his stripper girlfriend April (Chloe Hunter) to the bed during a wild bout of sex and then leaving her there for a couple of days while he runs errands for Nikki and "The Cook." The capper? April is rescued by Ross' lesbian neighbour, played by none other than Deborah Harry, who promptly takes April as a girlfriend.

The film's hysterical visual style combines drug-fuelled fantasy sequences, animation, fast-motion and numerous editing tricks intended to illustrate the effects of methamphetamine. Imagine the stylized druggy scenes from Requiem for a Dream amplified by a magnitude of ten and you'll be close to understanding director Akerlund's pull-out-all-the-stops approach. Of course, when excess is your theme, things sometimes get a bit excessive, and Akerlund occasionally takes things too far, especially in a plot strand involving two speed-snorting cops (Peter Stormare and Alexis Arquette) trying to bring down Spider Mike and "The Cook."

Oh yes, about the reunion of Rourke and Eric Roberts. The latter plays "The Cook's" rich benefactor as a gay, Elvis-coiffed sugar daddy and their brief meeting toward the end of the film can't help but make filmgoers who may be aware of Rourke's and Roberts' strange career paths shake their heads at the vagaries of fate. As someone once said, excess is the best revenge...