Gridlock’d

Tim Roth, Thandie Newton, and the late Tupac Shakur play strung-out members of an offbeat Detroit band in a well-made and pointedly satirical feature written and directed by Vondie Curtis Hall. After Newton overdoses and winds up in a coma, Shakur decides that the other two need to kick their habitsbut the government bureaucracy, the police, and some hoods manage to dissuade them at every turn. Hall’s anger about the way society works never blunts his tenderness toward the central characters, and all three of the leads are fineespecially Roth, who’s thankfully free of the dem-der-dose dialect Woody Allen assigned him in Everyone Says I Love You. With John Sayles and Tom Towles. (JR)

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