In a perfect world, Roche Laboratories would have paid Austinite Bob Ray to produce this genuinely warped, pharmacologically oriented tale of gutterpunk sniping and Lone Star drug running. That company's signature slacker sleep aid, Rohypnol, makes myriad appearances and fills the role of McGuffin as various characters scramble to score, scam, and snooze, all while blissfully bombed. Sure, dirtweed makes an appearance, but in the pantheon of cinematic drug abuse, roofies have it all over simple, old-fashioned marijuana. Of course, pot isn't likely to render you droolingly comatose or as woefully stupid as Toe (Jerry Don Clark), the skaggy star of Ray's drug opera. Toe, guitarist for the local band PigPoke and an occasional drug dealer, wants so badly to go on tour with his band (if only to play "to a different four people every night") that he backstabs a series of friends, steals their drug turf, gets the bejeesus beaten out of him by a psycho dealer, and ends up with a whole lot of blood on his hands, not all of which is his own.

At once sublimely accurate in its portrayal of the creepier end of the Austin music scene (infamous local band the Fuckemos are all over the place) and scathingly hilarious, Ray's film is a spot-on quasi-parody of the day-to-day existence of struggling Austin musicians and their wayward ways.

"I started writing a script a long time ago and then realized partway through it that I didn't have the money to blow up 16 trailer parks so I started writing another script about something I knew more about and with which I could utilize my resources. Being involved in bands and zines and pirate radio shows here in Austin kind of led me down this alley that ended up being ROCK OPERA. It's all about what this guy does to get some appreciation for his band." The way the character of Toe -- think Shaggy with a different kind of Scooby Snack -- tries to garner that appreciation is as double-dealingly backhanded as any of John Waters' lowlifes, and frequently funnier.

Austinites will have a blast spotting locations, cameos, and the assorted band members and hangers-on that populate Ray's film, while outsiders will recognize the cracked music scene template as S.O.P. for any scene in the country. It could be Seattle if not for the presence of Shiner Bock (fewer clams, too). So is this a biography of the Austin scene? "Sort of," says Ray. "A lot of pieces of the film are based on stories that I've heard or witnessed or been told by drunken folk around town, but then there's a lot of it that's fictionalized as well. A lot of people are playing exaggerated versions of themselves, like Russell Porter from the Fuckemos, who plays a guy named Ross who's in the Fuckemos." Finally, cinema as a mirror that doubles as a dope tray.

-- Marc Savlov, Austin Chronicle