mainstream films about addicts usually end with the characters either dying a suitably sordid, gruesome death, needle in hand, or redeeming themselves by swearing to clean up and checking into rehab. The implication is that once they've taken the vow of sobriety, cheerfully compassionate social workers will line up and lead them tenderly to an immaculate hospital, with clouds painted on the ceiling and fresh flowers in every room. Bullshit, says "Gridlock'd," a surprisingly light-hearted comedy about what happens when two self-imposed exiles from society decide to go straight and look to the system for a little help.

The fact that the two main characters — Spoon, played by Tupac Shakur, and his buddy Stretch, played by Tim Roth — are unemployed junkie musicians who sell VCR boxes packed with bricks to unsuspecting motorists seems of little import to first-time director Vondie Curtis Hall (known on the small screen as Dr. Dennis Hancock on Chicago Hope). He apparently assumes that his audience won't have any strong opinions about it, either. In this way, "Gridlock'd" is Newt Gingrich's worst nightmare about the amoral welfare state rendered in celluloid. Not only do the protagonists show no remorse for their unproductive, parasitic lifestyle, they act as if society owes them a "get out of jail free" card, which they can collect on whenever they please. To Hall, all that matters is that Spoon and Stretch want to get into rehab (partly to evade a drug kingpin from whom they've stolen three ounces of heroin) and that, in all of Detroit, they can't find one person willing (or able) to help them.

While it may give conservatives heart palpitations, Hall's determination not to judge his characters or view their situation as anything more than bad luck gives the film a buoyant, sitcom feel. It's like an Eddie Murphy buddy flick with heroin and HIV tests. Drug addicts, alcoholics and civil service workers are presented with an equal nonchalance. The only true villain in the film is the drug kingpin (played by Hall himself), a cool murderer in a sleek car with plates that read "Da Reper." In his opaque shades and wide-brimmed hat, Hall is, in fact, a symbol of the movie's real villain — any heartless, faceless bureaucracy interested only in money and self-preservation.

The scenes of Spoon and Stretch navigating various complex, uncaring social services departments have a fluid, sketch-comedy sensibility, and are largely carried by the easy chemistry between the two actors. Shakur glides through the film with understated grace and elegance. There is an eerie moment in the film when Spoon, contemplating kicking his drug habit, says, "I just feel like my luck is about to run out." Shakur's luck did run out (he was shot to death in Las Vegas last September), but one wonders if it was luck, or fate, or something else that made him become a rapper and not an actor. Whatever the case, "Gridlock'd" proves his death a loss to movie audiences as well as music fans.

Roth, on the other hand, plays his usual over-caffeinated wise-ass, a role that worked well for him in "Pulp Fiction," but has since grown increasingly tiresome. Why Spoon hangs out with Stretch is a mystery, except that Hall clearly wants to invert the usual racial stereotypes of most white/black buddy pictures. He presents Shakur as the thoughtful, mature partner, which serves this end nicely. But Roth's hyperactive, belligerent "crazy-ass white dude" is just too much to take.

Hall intercuts Spoon and Stretch's adventures at the end of every social services line in Detroit with flashbacks to the night the singer of their band — a pouty chanteuse named Cookie (Thandie Newton) — OD'd, prompting the two men to begin their long day's journey to methadone. These flashbacks are one of Hall's missteps: framed by light bulb flashes, overly arty and meekly replicating clichéd cinematic fetishizations of drug use without adding anything new. Compounding this problem are the scenes of the band performing: Spoon plays an improbable cello, Stretch squirms behind a keyboard and Cookie does Diana Ross doing Billie Holiday doing terrible "spoken word" poetry. The (unintentional) irony is that Cookie — the character who supposedly never did drugs until the night of her overdose — acts the most like a junkie, stumbling around behind the microphone, rolling her eyes and flapping her skinny wrists in the air.

Thankfully, Hall uses more restraint in his portrayal of the many clerks and social service workers the twosome turn to in their quest. Rather than harboring postal grade psychoses, these drones simply seem tired, overworked and as confused by the system as their clients. In a subtly affecting scene, Stretch provokes a Medicaid worker into an eloquent tirade about how Spoon and Stretch want to live outside the rules of health coverage and insurance and Social Security cards until they need help, and then expect everyone to bend over backwards to rush to their aid. It's a good point, one which reveals the service workers are just as harried by the red tape as Spoon and Stretch.

In the film's penultimate and most effective image, Spoon and Stretch sit in a chaotic emergency room, waiting for their numbers to be called. It's a picture made of equal parts despair and hope, the essence of the dispossessed's uneasy relationship to the welfare state. Despite the addicts' many trials and mishaps, they can still summon some faith that the system will come through for them, if they can only wait long enough.

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