A slick, frenetic advertisement for British club culture, 25-year-old writer-director Justin Kerrigan's Human Traffic speaks in a vocabulary of pop-cinema reference points (Trainspotting, A Clockwork Orange, Pulp Fiction, Taxi Driver, and so on) that's akin to sub-literacy. Still, its youthful energy is initially disarming, fueled by a potent mix of Ecstasy, hormones, and sheer affability. Unlike the countless imitators he's imitating, Kerrigan doesn't appear to have a dark side, nor does he feel obligated to show the consequences of using drugs beyond the bummer of coming down from a high at 5 a.m. He's weighed the merits of Ecstasy and he comes down strongly in favor of it. An episodic, night-in-the-life comedy in the Linklater tradition, Human Traffic follows five teenagers through the club scene in Cardiff, where they try to shake off the malaise of their day jobs in retail and fast food. Their ringleader is John Simm, who delivers excited monologues directly to the camera about how much he loves going out with his friends, each with punchy names like Nina, Koop, Lulu, and Moff. They have some minor individual problems—Simm suffers from performance anxiety, Shaun Parkes is an overly possessive boyfriend, Danny Dyer's conservative parents threaten to kick him out of the house—but nothing that can't be solved by techno and designer narcotics. Human Traffic is made with such a refreshingly cavalier attitude that it's a shame the dialogue isn't funnier or the characters as ingratiating as Kerrigan intends them to be. He shows a young punk's effrontery in dismantling the grim clichés of other drug movies, which rarely confess the pleasures of using in the first place. But watching Human Traffic becomes more sobering as it goes along, like looking in on a bunch of kids too wasted and obnoxious to entertain anyone but themselves.