Requiem for a Dream is directed to within an inch of its life by Darren Aronofsky, who throws everything at the screen and hopes it sticks. Much of it does. But by sheer volume of technical craft he defeats himself. Aronofsky means to show us drug addiction from the inside out, but too often he seems merely to be showing off what he learned in film school.

But it is a good film. Better than good. It is one of the most visceral films I’ve seen — graphic without being gratuitous, disturbing without being exploitive. It suffers from excess ambition, but I suppose there are worse things to suffer from. Uninspired it’s not.

The action centers on four characters: Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn), a lonely Brooklyn widow; Harry (Jared Leto), her son; Marion (Jennifer Connelly), Harry’s girlfriend; and Tyrone (Marlon Wayans), his buddy. Harry and his friends are heroin addicts; when the film opens Harry is stealing his mother’s television set to pawn for drug money — again. She’s an enabler; he keeps pawning her TV and she keeps buying it back; it would cut out the middle man just to steal cash straight out of her wallet, or maybe he thinks he hasn’t crossed that line.

The characters have aspirations beyond their ability to achieve them. Harry hopes to get rich selling drugs to finance Marion’s dream of becoming a fashion designer. He partners with Tyrone, who wants to leave the streets behind. Their plan could even work, and it does for a while, but they’re so dependent on the drugs themselves that they keep sliding. They dip into their savings to feed their habit. Soon the money dries up and a street war makes drugs hard to come by. Before long they have stopped looking ahead to distant dreams and worry only about how they will score their next fix, and the one after that, and the one after that, until they’ve exhausted even their most desperate options.

Sara is addicted to television, which Aronofsky tries to show us is potentially as harmful as drugs, but she finds her way to drugs too. She is a fan of The Tappy Tibbons Show, which from what I can see is a strange amalgamation of game show, infomercial, and Oprah; his motto is “JUICE,” which stands for “Join Us In Creating Excellence” — it’s the kind of acronym where you come up with the abbreviation first because it sounds catchy, and then figure out what it stands for. When she gets a phone call telling her she will be a contestant on the show, she lights up and is suddenly inspired to lose weight. Whether the TV opportunity is real I can say for sure even after three viewings; the longer she waits, the farther away it seems, until finally The Tappy Tibbons Show becomes a grotesque nightmare.

She tries to slim down the old fashion way — for about a day. Then her friend recommends a doctor — and I use the word “doctor” loosely — who prescribes her diet pills. They’re amphetamines, and they’re so strong that she needs to take another pill at night so she can sleep. Soon she hallucinates, and her delicate psyche starts to break under the strain.

There are a lot of visual and auditory effects in Requiem for a Dream: fish-eye lenses, body-mount cameras, fast forward, slow motion, jump cuts, cross cuts, and inserts. Aronofsky employs a strategy he calls “hip-hop montage”: a series of staccato cuts and sound effects used as shorthand to show us drug use — cut to heroin, cut to syringe, cut to bloodstream, cut to dilated pupil, and back to the actors, all in the space of seconds. He speeds up the action to show characters in frenzy, slows it down to show a crash, and sometimes does both in the same frame to show us a more intense kind of dissociation.

It’s too much. Much too much. I found myself preoccupied by craft and distracted from character and story. He uses SnorriCam, which is a camera mounted to the actor, and produces an eerie effect where the actor is frozen in the center of the frame and the background seems to move around him. He means to convey disorientation, but I kept thinking about the production. How did Wayans manage to run at a sprint while strapped to the apparatus? How did Connelly avoid banging it into the extras in an elevator scene? Later in the film comes an effect that breaks the camel’s back: when two characters are in pain, the screen image vibrates in resonance with the sound of their screams. Alright, Mr. Aronofsky. Now you’re just showing off.

There are two commentary tracks on the special edition DVD. One features Aronofsky. The other features his cinematographer Matthew Libatique. They both go into detail about the use of lighting and the position of the camera during the film’s very best scene, in which Sara confesses her loneliness to her son. But Burstyn’s performance is so remarkable that it seems almost beside the point where the camera is in relation to the light source. With that performance, you’d have a great scene if it took place inside a cardboard box lit by a book light. Last year Aronofsky directed The Wrestler, a great film that is great in part because of how little the filmmaker gets in its way.

Watching Requiem, I wanted to say to him, you’ve got four actors at your disposal giving courageous performances — and I don’t use that word lightly. Sometimes all you have to do is stand back and let them happen.

Watch a trailer for the film here: