Anyone for a battery-acid and Sudafed cocktail? Thought not

The crystal-meth underworld is devouring America. Is it time for another cool drug movie, asks Sean O'Connell

Soon there will be enough films to justify "The New Trainspotting" as a shelf category in your local video shop. Next to the five different DVD versions of Danny Boyle's trendsetter, a dusty copy of Human Traffic and the sanitised Requiem For a Dream, you will find the latest narco-adventure, Spun. An exploration of America's methamphetamine underworld, it marks the big screen debut of acclaimed Swedish music video director Jonas Åkerlund, whose work for the likes of the Prodigy, Jamiroquai and most notably Madonna ("Ray of Light") have turned him into something of a Hollywood hot property.

Thanks to a ready supply of ecstasy from our Dutch neighbours, methamphetamine - known in its various forms as ice, crystal meth, P, glass and crank - is still fairly unknown in Britain. In America, Australasia and many parts of the Far East, however, it has rapidly become the drug of choice for a whole cross-section of users. It's cheap, addictive and easy to make, with most of the ingredients found legally in chemists and hardware shops. According to the UN, in the past year 34 million people worldwide have taken methamphetamine or amphetamine, making it more prevalent than heroin and cocaine combined and over four times more widespread than ecstasy.

America's Drug Enforcement Administration is not renowned for its objective assessment of problems associated with drugs ("smoking marijuana leads to changes in the brain similar to those caused by the use of heroin and cocaine"), but when it dramatically declared earlier this year that meth was "the number one threat to rural America", there was more than a little truth in the comment. If trends continue in parts of the west and mid-west every other person arrested will test positive for the drug. In Tennessee the police talk not in terms of a problem but a "plague". In North Carolina judges are currently considering whether "cooking" methamphetamine creates a weapon of mass destruction as defined under the WMD statute. And, in perhaps the most startling illustration of the situation, 11 TV stations in Hawaii simultaneously screened a one-hour prime-time documentary about the drug in September, without any commercial breaks.

"It's a shit drug, one of the worst you could ever do," says Åkerlund. "I can understand some drugs, but there is nothing good about this - after the first three times even the high is not good. It tears you down so fast - you lose your teeth, your skin, everything in six months. It surprised me early on when we were researching the film that everybody I spoke to had a first-hand experience, or close friend who had been involved with the drug. It's a real growing problem."

Spun undoubtedly has all the essentials of the drug film genre: visual trickery; a cool soundtrack from Billy Corgan; a hip cast including Brittany Murphy, Mena Suvari and Jason Schwartzman; and a few names who were considered past-it but have become fashionable again (Mickey Rourke and Deborah Harry). But it rises above the pack in both creatively bringing a neglected drug to the cinema screen and providing one of the more enlightened anti-drug statements of recent years.

Based on the experiences of screenwriter and recovering meth addict Will De Los Santos, the film follows three sleepless days in the life of dropout meth-head Ross (Schwartzman), from his initial attempt to score at his run-down dealer's house to his recruitment by the local cook of the drug (Rourke), who hires him as a driver and errand boy in exchange for free gear. As Ross snorts his way round LA we meet an assortment of messed-up addicts, phone sex operators and giggling strippers who chart his downward spiral in a dark comic fashion. Sleep is a foreign country to most of the characters here, so dialogue and plot were never going to be omnipotent. Instead, Åkerlund strives to bring us as close to the meth experience as possible without having to gather up the Sudafed pills, battery acid, iodine tincture and red phosphorus that are needed to cook it up.

"It's really meant to be a slice of life and we're not just saying that because it's a shitty story," he says. "It's not a pleasant lifestyle and hopefully that's what you take away from the film." Watching Spun is certainly a dizzy, nauseating experience, with over 5,000 cuts (apparently a Guinness world record), trippy cartoon interludes and a cast that never stops twitching and tapping, it's very hard to shift your gaze away from the screen. Bleached-out photography removes any sense of time and place. Though in parts extremely funny, the world portrayed is grimy and sweaty, dirty and disorientating.

"I was trying to find a balance between making an entertaining movie that people could stand for 90 minutes and saying something important," Åkerlund continues. "I'm not saying to anybody that if you use drugs you die, or if you sell drugs you go to jail. I'm not scaring you. I'm not telling you anything. I'm just showing you a world that you will hopefully say no to, because it's a disgusting world.

"Hopefully there is something for parents in there too. I believe there are a lot of parents that know nothing about this. Knowing about it, hearing about it, to understand it can only be a good thing. I've had a lot of letters from people saying that the film worked as an eye opener."

Heroin seems to have shifted off the cultural radar in recent years, and with it the anachronistic message of Grange Hill's Zammo and friends that we should all just say "no". For a new drug threat, in a new era, with an ever more sophisticated audience, at the very least Spun strives to shift the rhetorical framework into more grown-up territory.

Spun (18) is released on Friday