It's a film based on the book by the late Hubert Selby Jr., a yank writer who was influenced heavily by the so-called beat writers of the 50's and 60's. Take the Kerouac stream of consciousness style and fuse it with some of Ginsberg's matter-of-fact/celebratory musings on the junky scene and you have some idea of Selby's style. Filmed a few years before his death, Selby even has a brief cameo appearance in the movie. Selby was known for looking at the dark side of life and exploring human pain to its fullest. This film follows that tradition and is based in a fitting locale.

Anyone not familiar with the US through travel or time spent living there has still developed a hazy mental image and feel (however inaccurate it may be) for various locales in that country due to a lifetime of watching Hollywood movies. Coney Island is a place that always evokes a strange mix of dreary imagery; lost hope, yearning, a not unappealing physical setting (the water and Manhattan skyscrapers in the distance) scarred with the ever-present dilapidated amusement park rides and boardwalk.

The kind of place where blue-collar workers end up--the ones who can't afford the more expensive neighbourhoods of New York city. Add in retirees who lived modest middle-class lives and the usual collection of directionless youngsters in every bleak, dead-end town who can never quite get it together to get move on to bigger and better things once they have grown, and you have the Coney Island of my mind's eye.

This then is the setting for the film, one that charts the course of 4 lives and the impact of drug addiction upon them. Pain is sublime, pure and all encompassing in this ordeal of a movie, where there is never any doubt regarding who will win--the narcotics (actually heroin in 3 cases and a nasty diet pill addiction in the other) or the characters involved. The only matters in question are how sweetly wrenching their downfalls will be, what horrific fate awaits each and whether any sense of hope at all can be snatched from the depths of despair.

In essence this film is comprised of 4 character sketches in self-destruction as induced by dependence on drugs. None of the minor obstacles thrown in the way of the characters are overcome so much as embraced. There are some not unexpected twists to the semblance of a plot but again, the downward trajectory is never really halted or in question.

The story centers around Harry Goldfarb (played by Jared Leto), his girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly), their friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) and Harry's mother, Sara (Ellen Burstyn).