For a mother and son, the dust of sweet dreams is no fairy tale

The life of a drug addict is raw and lonely, spinning on the intensity of its needs for food, sleep and a fix. The world around him is a grim, almost surreal, place, a tightly enclosed space bereft of moral substance or overriding goals. Days and nights blend into one, and only the glowing addiction, like another moon, shines in his sky.

I’ve been aware of this world over the years, but I have never seen it captured so well as in a documentary called “Foo-Foo Dust.” This is a film by Gina Levy and Eric Johnson about a mother, Stephanie, and her son, Tony, whose lives are entwined not only by relationship but also by drugs. Stephanie is a crack cocaine addict and Tony is on heroin.

It’s the combination of mother and son drifting together in the blurry world of drugs that makes this film unique. The title itself has a double meaning, rooted in both domesticity and street. Stephanie once, in her straight life, used the term to help put her infant son to sleep at night. Foo-foo dust, in that depiction, was fairy dust sprinkled over his crib.

But it’s also a street term for crack, the stuff that now puts Stephanie to sleep, while Tony goes comatose after shooting up with heroin. Foo-foo dust is no longer a child’s fairy dust trip to slumber land but an adult ride to degeneracy where there are never sweet dreams.

Most of the documentary, a prizewinner at the recent IFP/Los Angeles Film Festival, takes place in a seedy San Francisco hotel room that reflects the disordered lives of Stephanie and Tony.

Eric Johnson, a still photographer in the Bay Area, met them while shooting pictures in San Francisco’s Tenderloin and asked if they would agree to be subjects for a documentary. They said yes.

Nothing is omitted from this 39-minute glimpse into the kind of moral chaos that people can create for themselves. It is a few moments isolated by the very nature of their lives, without past or future, existing only in the time span of the film. Stephanie’s language, amid a cocaine fit, is obscene and abusive to her son, who finds peace shooting up on the bathroom floor and sagging slowly into the dead blackness of heroin.

The movie is set apart by rare moments of endearment between Stephanie and Tony, when she tells him he needs a drug program in phrases that mix motherly concern with the language of the street, and when she realizes in a stupor that “we need some help,” as, briefly, they hug.

Later, we hear Tony talking to the camera about hating drugs and hating his mother’s turn to prostitution to support their habits. He remembers, as a child, hearing the moans of sexual passion from another room when Stephanie took in customers, and one can almost feel the chill of revulsion trembling through him.

But all of this is talk, for both mother and son. In the end, despite fleeting dreams of a better life, Stephanie continues paying for her drugs on her back, and Tony, in a compelling twist of fate, also turns to prostitution to pay for his addiction. As far as the filmmakers know, the two are still in San Francisco and still on drugs.

I asked Levy, who lives in Calabasas, what their point was in making the documentary. One comes away disturbed by its dreary but hypnotizing qualities and yet questioning its purpose. They had no preconceived agenda, she says. Johnson wanted simply to open the lives of Stephanie and Tony to the camera. She wanted to explore the relationship between mother and son, to glimpse the dynamics of their existence under extreme circumstances.

As I watched “Foo-Foo Dust,” I kept thinking about a recovering addict, a woman named Tammy, I had written about years ago. She was a gifted artist who drew unicorns with tears in their eyes as fantasy projections of her sad and distorted life. When I met her, she knew that she was nearing the end. She couldn’t do it anymore.

A $300-a-day heroin habit had destroyed her physically. Years of prostitution had degraded her morally. Sober for 70 days, she could feel herself slipping and at one point threw her head back and screamed, “God, get me out of this!” She disappeared into the streets. I never saw her again.

Stephanie reminded me of Tammy. Both, in separate ways, represent the destructive power of drugs.

Tammy was alone in her isolated world. Stephanie’s addiction was compounded by what she had done to her son. Their relationship was forged in hell and likely to end there.

The dust that was sprinkled on an infant still falls in their lives, and it has darkened the world they occupy.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Monday and Friday. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.