Our setting is Orange County, California, sometime in the new future, where "Fred" -- that's his code name -- is an undercover narcotics agent investigating some small-time users of Substance D, a drug so addictive that "you're either on it or you've never tried it." While undercover, he wears a scramble suit, a full-body (including head and face) jumpsuit that constantly changes his appearance so that those he deals with (even his supervisor) can never get a solid grip on what he looks like; the most they'll see or remember is a vague blur.
Among those being investigated is Robert Arctor, who spends most of his time lounging around his house, having long rambled drug-fueled conversations with his pals, who are also hooked on D. Bob is beginning to suffer the side effects of long-term D use, which include a growing inability to recognize familiar faces and objects, and a dissociation of the hemispheres of his brain, which are beginning to do battle with one another.
Those symptoms are making Bob's day job more difficult, because as it happens, Bob and Fred are the same person, so addled that Fred doesn't recognize himself when watching surveillance tapes of Bob, and Bob has no idea that he's the one who planted the cameras in his own home.
Keanu Reeves plays Bob/Fred, and while it's not one of his best performances, his befuddled blandness fits well with his character's increasing confusion and disorientation. The supporting cast includes Robert Downey, Jr., Winona Ryder, and Woody Harrelson (a twistedly appropriate group for a movie about addiction), and they make up for Reeves' weakness; Downey is especially good, and deserves to be in contention for a supporting Oscar nomination.
Odds are that won't happen, though, if only because the movie is animated, using similar rotoscoping technology to that in Linklater's Waking Life; the movie was filmed live, and the individual frames traced to create an animated film. In Waking Life, I thought the jiggliness of the technique was annoying, and it left me with a bad headache; here, the look is a bit more stable (though the shifting highlights in Ryder's hair are oddly snakelike) and much easier to watch.
And unlike in Waking Life, where the rotoscoping felt like an unnecessary gimmick, the technology serves useful purposes in this movie; it allows for a beautiful realization of the scramble suit technology, which would be very difficult and expensive to achieve in live action. In addition, rotoscoping gives the movie a crisp and vivid look, but you never lose the awareness that what you're seeing isn't quite real, which (though I can't speak from personal experience) feels appropriate for a movie about drug use.
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