Writer-director Rosemary Rodriguez's autobiographical debut feature Acts Of Worship was based on her own experiences in the streets, when she was a homeless junkie doing anything she could to pursue her next fix. It's possible the film really is what it intends to be: an honest account of addiction, filled with exacting details about the destructive patterns of guilt, self-loathing, and narcissism that go along with it. But because these patterns are predictable enough to calibrate a Swiss timepiece, Rodriguez's story is doomed to dramatic cliché, forced down an inescapable path through addiction, recovery, relapse, degradation, and death. As Augusten Burroughs (Running With Scissors) confesses in Dry, his recent memoir on alcoholism, he felt powerless to stop his life from becoming a movie-of-the-week. Every once in a while, a film like Requiem For A Dream transcends the usual trappings with illuminating feats of style, but Rodriguez goes for raw, straight-ahead emotional realism and doesn't glean a single fresh moment from all the resultant hysteria. The first of two alter-egos, Ana Reeder leads an overamped cast as an educated woman from a middle-class background whose intelligence and self-awareness haven't kept her from scoring crack at every opportunity. ("I'll get my shit together," she says. "But not today.") Living in a Harlem slum with on-again/off-again boyfriend Nestor Rodriguez, Reeder feeds her habit by pawning stolen merchandise to street vendors and borrowing money from a drying well of sources, including her Christian parents, who have given up on her. Reluctant to seek help from anyone, she gets a shot at salvation after meeting photographer Michael Hyatt, a recovering addict whose black-and-white shots of local junkies have made her the toast of the New York art scene. Considered together, Reeder and Hyatt are like "before" and "after" pictures of Rodriguez herself: the former a belligerent crackhead snared in a vicious cycle, the latter an artist looking at her own reflection in front of the camera lens. Much of the time, the two just bounce slogans off each other, frequently whipping Reeder into the over-the-top tirades of a bad John Cassavetes movie. Though it isn't explained until the closing minutes, the title Acts Of Worship says a lot about Rodriguez's terminal weakness for the overwrought and faux-poetic. No effect is too shameless, whether it's the thudding symbolism of children's toys framed behind a chain-link fence or Reeder petulantly cursing the Magic 8-Ball for its pessimistic answer to the question "Am I gonna make it?" Once Hyatt gets the taste of champagne on her lips, the film goes off the deep end, Reefer Madness-style.