By Matt Soergel
Florida Times-Union

Requiem for a Dream has all the right trappings for edgy independent-film credibility: A relentlessly bleak tone, plenty of squalor, split screen and speeded-up cinematography, dream sequences and a source novel few have read.

Still . . .

For an edgy indie movie, it also traffics in a whole host of stereotypes: A black man is the sexual predator, a bald man is the sexual doofus, white Southerners are racists, old Jewish ladies are nattering fools.

Then there are these bold statements: TV is bad; drug, abuse, too.

Requiem for a Dream, now at the Pablo 9 in Jacksonville Beach, is the latest movie from director Darren Aronofsky, the auteur behind the visually striking Pi a couple of years ago.

This film looks and sounds great (the eerie techno score is one of its strongest points). But it's more of a victory for style over substance, covering up for its weakest point -- its too-pat, completely grim story, which is not so much a downward spiral as a complete free-fall.

It follows the hell that is the lives of four drug addicts in Brooklyn.

Harry (Jared Leto) dreams of making a big score with his streetwise buddy, Tyrone (Marlon Wayans): Just one big drug deal and they'll be set. Jennifer Connelly is Marion, a pampered rich girl who has to decide whether she'll sell her body to feed her habit.

Stop us if you've heard that before.

What makes Requiem for a Dream notable, though, is the performance of its fourth addict: Ellen Burstyn. She plays Sara Goldfarb, Harry's mom, a widow who's at first addicted only to a self-help TV hosted by the unctuous Tappy Tibbons (the always unctuous Christopher McDonald).

Convinced she's going to get on his show, she tries to diet her way into her favorite red dress. Weeks later she's a hollow-cheeked shell who imagines her refrigerator is out to eat her, like something out of a Stephen King novel.

Burstyn is ferocious and pathetic, using prosthetic fat suits and a brave display of gut-wrenching, old-fashioned acting to show her Sara's complete ruination, which culminates in a degradation so over the top that it's not even effective. It just feels like cheating.

She's better than the rest of the film. And if there's justice, she should get an Oscar nomination -- that is if those squeamish Academy voters can get themselves to sit through the rest of the movie.