THE BETTER SIDE OF TUPAC

By RICHARD CORLISS

A perplexing chasm separated the two Tupac Shakurs. As rap's Public Gangsta No. 1, he spumed venom on CD, reeked menace onstage, wore his tattoos like a war hero's medals, did time for violent crimes and, at 25, got gunned down in Las Vegas last September. As a budding film star, though, he pinwheeled charm and emotional purity. Shakur, who had acted professionally since he was 12, wasn't quite Sidney Poitier, but in a decent range of roles (in Juice, Poetic Justice, Above the Rim) he showed power and promise.

In Gridlock'd, an ambitious first film as writer-director by actor Vondie Curtis Hall, Shakur plays Spoon, a musician who resolves to say aloha to heroin after his singer girlfriend Cookie (radiant Thandie Newton) nearly dies from a drug overdose. The plot has Spoon and his nutsy pal Stretch (wild man Tim Roth) fleeing a Detroit drug lord (Curtis Hall) who's peeved that the lads stole his stash. But the real story is of the runaround Spoon and Stretch get from social-service employees who can't be bothered to help addicts get into rehab programs. This is an action comedy about two guys waiting in line for nothing to happen: Samuel Beckett rewritten for Simpson-Bruckheimer.

Alkies and druggies of old movies (The Lost Weekend, Days of Wine and Roses, The Man with the Golden Arm) didn't need government rehab to shake the monkey off their backs. Part of the joke here is that Spoon and Stretch, who are less performance artists than petty criminals, suffer from welfare-state dependency. And in Michigan, this is the wrong state to depend on. Public servants are ignorant or lazy or just plain crazy. But Spoon and Stretch aren't your ideal victims. Their signature act of social aggression is to smoke cigarettes in government offices. Their way of bonding is for one to give the other a gut wound with a penknife. They're the Jerky Boys, playing mortal pranks on themselves.

The film's villains are from Central Casting, the cops from Keystone. But that's not what matters. Taking a page from the Martin Scorsese handbook, Curtis Hall smartly heightens moments with epic visual declarations (slo-mo, negative images, gigantic closeups). The speeches are arias, the shots operatic, complex.

The performances are also big; nearly everyone in this Act-O-Rama gets a screaming scene. The tone is set by Roth, the Brit of choice for those directors who think Gary Oldman just doesn't push it far enough. It's cartoon work, really (imagine Henery Hawk trying to be the Tasmanian Devil), but fun to watch. And Shakur, as the sensible guy, plays nicely off Roth. He is both Stretch's keeper and the film's conscience. "When gettin' high becomes a job," he muses, "what's the point?"

Shakur also serves as his own elegist. "All the things we talked about," he says of Cookie when he thinks she might be dead, "things she wanted to do--then she ups and dies. I don't wanna go out like that." Later he speaks one of the most introspective lines in the Afro-action canon: "Somehow I don't think this was my parents' dream for me." With Shakur's death, Hollywood lost part of its own dream to become a robust rainbow cinema. Gridlock'd gives a taste of what the movies are going to miss.

--By Richard Corliss