PLOT: Stretch (TIM ROTH) and Spoon (TUPAC SHAKUR) are two drug addicts who decide to go clean after a friend of theirs, Cookie (THANDIE NEWTON) goes into a drug-induced coma. His tragedy may ultimately be that he didn’t believe his humanity mattered.QUICK TAKE: Drama: Two drug addicts try to go clean while avoiding local thugs and the police. Shakur had it to spare, along with many other qualities: wit, sexiness, a self-involvement poetic in its intensity. But as every good actor since Brando has understood, vulnerability can lure a movie audience right into your soul. To a true thug, of course, vulnerability is unthinkable it makes you look soft. As for Shakur, with his morose elegance and beautiful liquid eyes, he lends Spoon a tremor of sorrow, projecting a supple emotionalism almost entirely at odds with his gangsta-prince image - the hell-bent rap nihilist so intoxicated by the ”thug life” that, in the end, he literally appeared to be courting his own murder. He makes the dense, gawky Stretch defiantly myopic, a hustler who can’t focus on anything but what’s directly in front of him. More than any other contemporary British actor, Roth adores playing scuzz-ball Americans. The fun of the movie lies in the way that Roth and Shakur manage to seem feverishly alive amid all this manic-depressive running in place.

Curtis Hall has caught the bottom-feeder enervation of heroin addiction - the fact that most of it consists of shooting up, nodding out, talking about scoring, going out to score, and then starting the whole business over again. Still, if the setup is facile, what follows has a bombed-out authenticity. But from the moment Stretch and Spoon reach the street, with Cookie lying in limbo, the two men are such raggedly ill-disciplined lowlifes - at times, they seem like homeless derelicts - that I never really bought them as quasi-professional musicians. They play together, live together, sometimes even sleep together. As it turns out, the three are partners, members of a bohemian spoken-word/jazz trio. They drag her to the hospital and go off into the night, numb but shaken, determined to change their lives. Gridlock’d opens with a jolt: On New Year’s Eve, Stretch (Roth) and Spoon (Shakur), holed up in their garbage-strewn loft, discover that Cookie (Thandie Newton), the slinky beauty they’re with, has overdosed herself into a coma. Making his debut as a filmmaker, Curtis Hall, an actor himself ( Chicago Hope, William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet), shows a gift for back talk and confrontation, for the hardscrabble comedy of urban decay, and for an electric storytelling style that sometimes shades off into B-movie glibness. Gridlock’d doesn’t have the imaginative vision of a movie like Trainspotting, yet it’s more literally true to the haphazard torpor of the junkie life than anything we’ve seen on screen since Drugstore Cowboy. Desperate to get into rehab, they’re tossed from one ugly fluorescent-lit government office to the next, a comedy of urban errors that escalates in insanity when the police mistake them for killers.

As Gridlock’d goes on, the two have run-ins with cops, drug dealers, gangsters, and a welfare bureaucracy so rusty and sclerotic you’d call it Kafkaesque were there any real design to it. Written and directed by Vondie Curtis Hall, the movie, set in the squalid backstreets of Detroit, is a vibrantly gritty lower-depths comedy, a tale of hapless junkie thieves, played by Shakur and Tim Roth, who bum around the city like a couple of alley cats, torn between their desire to score and their desperation to kick. But Gridlock’d, which he completed two months before his death in a still-unsolved shooting incident last September, proves that he had the dynamism and flair of a major screen actor. We’ll never know if Tupac Shakur could have been a movie star.

Gridlock movie 1997