All Eyes on Him

It’s the same whenever you’re watching a movie featuring an actor who has died between his performance and the film’s release. Feelings of dread or sadness hang over each of his scenes, your mind does a double-read of dialogue that is now darkly ironic, and you have to consciously push out the post-production news to stay with the story.

“Lately, I’ve been feeling that my luck’s running out,” says the late rap star Tupac Shakur’s Spoon, early in the black comedy “Gridlock’d.”

It’s his drug addiction that has Spoon down, but as we look at this handsome, vibrant young actor, it’s impossible not to leap ahead to that intersection in Las Vegas where, last fall, Shakur’s luck finally did run out, in a hail of bullets that left him fatally wounded.

We’ll never know whether the violence-prone Shakur could have beaten back the demons that had him in constant scrapes with the law, but his performance in “Gridlock’d” underscores the waste of his talent. Cast against type as the gentler of two musician junkies trying to burrow through the bureaucracy to enter a rehab clinic in Detroit, Shakur has the relaxed screen presence of a young Wesley Snipes and plays perfectly off the delirious Tim Roth.

Written and directed by actor Vondie Curtis Hall (“Passion Fish”), “Gridlock’d” follows Spoon and Roth’s Stretch through a chaotic day of bureaucratic runarounds and street chases. The New Year’s Eve overdose of Cookie (Thandie Newton), the singer in their jazz/performance art trio, has prompted a resolution from Spoon to enter rehab. His pal Stretch, for whom anything new is a potential high, decides to sign on with him.

But getting past the clerks and the paperwork stacked up between them and detox is more than the strung-out junkies can bear, and they spend as much of their time trying to stay high and out of trouble as they do trying to find help.

Curtis Hall, in his directing debut, has created an effective mix of comedy, drama and action. Though things descend into slapstick at times, the basic premise--that government red tape does as much to foil rehabilitation as facilitate it--adds a nice satiric edge, and Roth and Shakur have terrific chemistry.

Roth, who seems to get every social misfit role that Gary Oldman doesn’t, has never been as spring-loaded wacky as he is here. Stretch is a white guy who thinks he’s a brother, and gets himself and Spoon into trouble trying to use the “N” word as an affectation, and challenges killers to act on their impulses. It’s a funny, dark, almost spooky performance.

Newton, seen mostly in flashbacks, is also very good as Cookie, a fledgling Billie Holiday both on stage and in her drug haze. But it’s Shakur, who has one more movie (“Gang Related”) coming before the book is closed on his film career, who attracts most of our attention. With his tattooed and bullet-scarred torso on display in several scenes, he’s like his own catalog of bad times, and a promo for the trouble ahead.

His fans will have more reason to mourn now than ever.

* MPAA rating: R, for graphic drug use, pervasive strong language, female nudity and a scene of sexuality. Times guidelines: The comedy may make the drug use seem glamorous to some teens.

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‘Gridlock’d’

Tim Roth: Stretch

Tupac Shakur: Spoon

Thandie Newton: Cookie

Vondie Curtis Hall: D’Reper

Gramercy Pictures. Writer-director Vondie Curtis Hall. Producers Damian Jones, Paul Webster, Erica Huggins. Executive producers Ted Field, Russell Simmons, Scott Kroopf. Photography Bill Pope. Production design Dan Bishop. Editor Christopher Koefoed. Costumes Marie France. Music Stewart Copeland. Set decoration Kristen Toscano Messina. Running time: 1 hour, 31 minutes.

* In general release.