No matter how feeble his protest, Dan, a poet and junkie, finally allows his art-school girlfriend, Candy, to shoot up with him. The experience brings her close to ODing in a bathtub, but a quick shot of salt in her veins revives her. As she regains consciousness, she can only reply that it was a great rush and she wants more.

Wanting more, of course, will lead to a lessened life, as Dan (Heath Ledger) and Candy (Abbie Cornish) begin to hock and rob to sustain their habit, finally reducing themselves to peddling their own flesh (though Dan will chicken out, leaving Candy on the game for the two of them). Candy's parents, particularly her father, offer some long-suffering help, though the couple's one refuge from the world is with Casper (Geoffrey Rush), a gay professor who also has a heroin habit and has taken a liking to Dan.

Freshman director Neil Armfield's debut suffers from a number of first-film stumbles, though he's pulled some excellent performances from his cast. The story has been divided into three acts, with the first part "Heaven" tracking Dan and Candy's intense love story, "Earth" representing the moment when everything begins to crash around them, and finally "Hell," which is self-explanatory. It's a rather naive approach (although it may exist in Luke Davies' original novel), and it doesn't help matters much that the middle "Earth" section is so powerful that "Hell" hasn't anywhere to go but down.

Yet from this wrenching scene we shift, again for reasons unknown, to a country retreat, where the damaged couple hole up. What was nakedly human and brutally honest in the "Earth" segment becomes a melodramatic "Hell." Candy will have a rather artful nervous breakdown (it's the most painting this "painter" has done in the entire film), while Dan mopes about, stumbling on a few of Death's outposts. It becomes difficult not to wish the film had ended much earlier.

That we care for this couple at all is due to Ledger and Cornish's work. After all the critical acclaim he justly received last year for Brokeback Mountain, Ledger obviously wanted to appear in this small, indie Australian film to fully prove his chops as an actor — and succeeds. His Dan is a louche loser, but his genuine, profound love for Candy, for whom he also feels guilt-racked for having corrupted, is his character's salvation. Dan's attempt to go clean shows Ledger conjuring with the rawest emotions, and, as he did in Brokeback, leaving the audience with some indelible images.

Cornish, a relative newcomer, is still a good match for Ledger. Her looks will probably confine her to dull romantic parts in the future, but there's ample evidence here of a powerful young actor. Though she overplays the nervous breakdown, the problem lies with the script and direction. Her work in the earlier part of the film is often riveting.

The supporting cast, particularly Rush as the scholarly, dope-pushing roué, is good. Australian actor Tony Martin, as Candy's sad, loving father, turns in a very affecting performance. His reaction to Candy's news of her pregnancy is almost unbearable to watch for the grief it provokes in him.