At certain points, the seductively beautiful film is so hard to watch that you want to shield your eyes and beg for release. And right at that point, Aronofsky makes it even harder to bear.

On the surface, the script, based on Hubert Selby's novel and faithfully adapted by Selby and Aronofsky, tells two parallel stories of addiction. In one, junkie hipster Harry Goldfarb (a rail-thin Jared Leto) slouches around with his best friend, Tyrone (Marlon Wayans), investing small amounts of cash in heroin and shooting up bits of the profits.

Their goal is to work up the drug-dealer food chain so that they can buy a "pound of pure" and sit back in smack bliss while street urchins hustle their dope. With all the cash and free time, Harry promises his loving, sophisticated girlfriend, Marion (Jennifer Connelly), that he'll help her open a retail shop where she can sell some of the clothes that she draws on loose sheets of drawing paper.

In the other story, Harry's mother, Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn), spends her days watching infomercials and eating chocolates alone in her small, solitary apartment near Coney Island. After a vague phone call that promises to put her on television, she starts taking diet pills so that she can fit into an old, fancy dress for her big moment.

As the characters in both stories spiral deeper and deeper into addiction, they meet paranoia, self-loathing and desperation. They lose grip on the dreams -- the American dreams -- that sent them into their drug frenzies, and they become more selfish and more self-destructive. And addiction laughs at them even louder.

"Requiem for a Dream" is Aronofsky's second feature after the jittery, paranoid "Pi." Like that film, "Requiem" is wickedly shot, heavily stylized and expertly edited, both visually and audibly. (The split-screen images and surrealist set designs are showy and impressive, but the sound design is astonishing.)

Aronofsky and I met recently in a hotel room on Central Park West in New York. It was early in a day full of interviews for him. He had much to talk about: Just a few days earlier, Hollywood trades had announced that he would be developing a script for -- and potentially directing -- "Batman V."

Why are so many young, talented filmmakers drawn to drug movies, particularly heroin movies? At this point, heroin movies are almost their own genre.

"Requiem for a Dream" is not about heroin or about drugs. In fact, I was never interested in making a movie about junkies -- I find junkies really boring and uninteresting. What was amazing to me about the novel, and what I tried to do in the movie, was the counterpoint of this Sara Goldfarb story, which completely deconstructed the movie as a drug movie. The Harry-Tyrone-Marion story is a very traditional heroin story. But putting it side by side with the Sara story, we suddenly say, "Oh, my God, what is a drug?"

What Selby is saying is that anything can be a drug -- it doesn't have to be smack. It could be TV, it can be coffee, it can be chocolate, it can be food, it can be hope, it could be love, it could be sex. The idea that the same inner monologue goes through a person's head when they're trying quit drugs as with cigarettes, as when they're trying to not eat food so they can lose 20 pounds, was really fascinating to me. I thought it was an idea that we hadn't seen on film and I wanted to bring it up on the screen.

I'm sorry, but I want to stay on this: Do you think that people keep coming back to this drug subculture because it's a good place to look for larger metaphors and bigger stories?

I don't think that's what it is. The films that pop into my head are "Drugstore Cowboy" and "Trainspotting."

Did you see "Jesus' Son"?

Yeah, but "Jesus' Son" really isn't about drugs either.

Exactly. And neither is "Drugstore Cowboy" or "Trainspotting."

Well, I think "Trainspotting" is -- a lot.

Well, it's about hope and life.

Yeah, but you really can't make a film ... I guess drugs act as a struggle. A lot of those films have a similar theme -- which is at the core of "Requiem" -- which is that battle between addiction and the human spirit.

In a lot of ways, we looked at "Requiem for a Dream" as a monster movie. The creature was invisible; it lived in their heads. Addiction. That's the human struggle. All of us have our addictions, whether it's procrastination or workaholism or TV -- we're constantly dealing with that struggle.

Now playing: Read all the recent movie reviews by Salon's critics