Though director Richard Linklater has crossed successfully into commercial territory with School of Rock (and unsuccessfully with Bad News Bears), he's made his biggest cinematic mark as a cult filmmaker.

More than Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise or even Waking Life, Linklater's latest - the babbling, often incomprehensible sci-fi tale A Scanner Darkly - seems aimed far outside the mainstream.

Despite its big-name cast - Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson - A Scanner Darkly feels like something the filmmakers cobbled together with little regard to audience interest.

Linklater and company have two intentions. First, crafting a faithful adaptation of Philip K. Dick's grim novel of drug addiction. Second, creating a shimmery dream state expanding on the one the director created in Waking Life by painting over the live-action footage with digital animation, the result resembling a walking, talking graphic novel.

In frustrating fashion, they succeed at both goals. Dick's plot, with its narcotics obsession, paranoia and ubiquitous surveillance, is intact, but dramatically catatonic amid the ceaseless white noise of the characters' patter.

And the animated dream state is front and centre, so much so that it feels like a gimmick in search of a movie.

In Waking Life, the animation served the narrative, which essentially was a series of hallucinatory philosophical snippets surreally melting into one another. A Scanner Darkly seems like a story chosen to fit the style, as though after Waking Life, Linklater asked, "What else would look cool shot in live action then turned into animation?''

Based on Dick's own struggles with drug abuse, the story follows the descent of Bob Arctor (Reeves), a narcotics cop in the near future whose undercover assignment leads to his own addiction and personality disintegration.

Arctor's ordered to step up surveillance on his associates (Downey, Ryder, Harrelson and Rory Cochrane) to find the source of a drug called Substance D, which gradually leads users to paranoia of all around them.

Rather than act, the players act out, their characters rambling heavily through Linklater's dense screenplay. There's little real action. Instead, people blurt, others react.

The performances range from far too much with Downey's motor-mouthed jabber to far too little with Reeves' monotonous mutterings.

The imagery proves a nice distraction from the dullness of the dialogue. Especially impressive are undercover agents' "scramble suits,'' high-tech cloaks that flicker and waver to conceal the wearer's identity, and a sequence in which Cochrane's character is convinced he's being consumed by bugs.

Originally scheduled for release last fall, A Scanner Darkly was delayed while the filmmakers finished the painstaking animation of the live-action footage. The animation is so integral, it's hard to imagine A Scanner Darkly existing in the real world - or being remotely interesting to watch had it been left in its live-action state.

Whatever drama the movie holds is an afterthought, resulting in a triumph of form over content, style over substance abuse.

Two stars out of four.