I went through a Philip K. Dick phase shortly after college. I still have all his books sitting on a shelf here at home. I’ve been generally disappointed by the films made from PKD’s books, with the exception of Blade Runner — though that really doesn’t resemble the book much and should be considered as a completely separate work of art. (Oh, ok, “Barjo” is also a reasonable adaptation, but it is not one of PKD’s better-known — or even science fiction — stories.)

A Scanner Darkly is an excellent adaptation. It is very close to what I recall of the original book. The choice of turning the film into a kind of animation works very well for this story. The story deals with addicts whose view of reality slowly skews, and the animation sometimes lets us feel this, as objects occasionally float oddly against their backgrounds.

Robert Downey is great in this movie. But as I’ve said before I love the crazed raconteur style. He excels at it here; some scenes (like the bicycle scene) had me laughing and rocking back and forth in my chair. (It was mildly awkward since I was sitting between a coworker and a coworker’s friend, and I didn’t know them very well…) Maybe this stuff is only funny if you knew a bunch of stoners back in the day.
Overall though I didn’t connect to the movie as well as I did with the book. (Lesson to filmmakers: it is probably better not to stick to closely to the book. These comparisons rarely go in the film’s favor.) While the comedy scenes were great, the more serious parts of the film seemed a bit flat. Also it was a bit hard to get inside the characters’ heads, so even though I knew what was going on, it still didn’t quite add up.

Nevertheless I’d recommend it.