REVIEWED - ADAM & PAUL: The award-winning 1991 short, 3 Joes, an inventive and entertaining silent comedy, amply demonstrated director Lenny Abrahamson's flair for the medium. This is even more evident in his belated feature film début, Adam & Paul, a thoughtful and acutely observed serious comedy set in Dublin, writes Michael Dwyer.

Its eponymous protagonists are a couple of longtime friends followed over the course of one eventful day as they stumble around the city desperately scrounging for drugs. Adam (Mark O'Halloran) and Paul (Tom Murphy) are stubbly, scruffy, glazed-eyed, down to "a few coppers", and shunned even by drug dealers.

O'Halloran's screenplay nimbly puts them through a series of encounters with opportunists, petty criminals, hardened crooks, fellow junkies and former friends as the hapless pair single-mindedly pursue the need to feed their addiction. The protagonists are such unprepossessing characters that most people would cross the road to avoid them, but the film skilfully, subtly draws the viewer into their anxiety-riddled lives.

The film finds humour in the most unlikely places, and there are echoes of Withnail & I in some of the zany predicaments that arise, and in the contrast between Adam, who is quite grounded and resourceful, and the naïve, spaced-out Paul, who is hopelessly accident-prone.

In one particularly well-judged sequence, the two junkies lecture a Bulgarian immigrant that this is "our country" and ask what he's doing here. He tellingly responds by enquiring, "What are you doing here?"

Over the movie's briskly paced duration, we get to know the men very well indeed, and even begin to care for them. O'Halloran and Murphy, who are on screen throughout, immerse themselves in their roles, effectively sparking off each other in vivid, perfectly complementary performances.

For all its sharp Dublin banter and knockabout physical comedy, this scenario is rooted in realism, never attempting to idealise or glamorise the protagonists and their plight, and it shows their capacity for cruelty as well as an unexpected tenderness in a film that builds to a moving resolution. Abrahamson and his imaginative lighting cameraman, James Mather, make remarkable use of Dublin locations.