ogether with his partners Johnson (Grundy) and Winston (Campos), Rand (Livingston) spends most of his time on his pet project, an artificial life form named Koy-Koy. Koy-Koy is a computer-animated bird programmed to respond to commands and recognize users by the sounds of their voices. When the trio's investors issue a directive to test the program in a classroom environment, they balk at the thought of 5-year-old kids telling them what to do, but in the declining economic climate of Silicon Valley they have no choice but to submit to their investors' demands.
One evening, while escaping the pressures of work, Rand and Winston go out to a bar for drinks. There they meet Sarah (Lloyd), who seems attracted to Rand but goes home with the suave Winston instead. It's a decision they both soon regret, and Sarah leaves immediately after going to bed with him. They all cross paths again soon after, however, when it turns out that Sarah is the teacher in the classroom where Koy-Koy will be tested.
This time, Rand acts on his feelings for Sarah. In an effort to further study the mating ritual, he begins building a companion for Koy-Koy. As Rand and Sarah grow closer, he explains his theory that love and attraction are merely the physiological effects of a chemical in the brain called dopamine. Sarah, still suffering from past emotional wounds, takes offense at this and backs away from their burgeoning relationship.
The space between them grows when Rand learns of Sarah's one-night stand with Winston. As the investors threaten to pull the plug on the Koy-Koy project, Rand's life is thrown further into disarray. Facing an uncertain future, Rand must decide where his priorities lie and whether he can accept the possibility that love is an inexplicable phenomenon.
A thesis in search of a proof
This stand-out film from last year's Sundance Festival explores the idea that love is nothing more than a chemical reaction. Dopamine is science fiction in a very literal sense. It's fiction about science and the possibilities it gives us to examine the existence of abstract notions like love and attraction. While it's an interesting idea, the film fails to mine the full wealth of it by not providing any answers to the questions it poses.
Rand and Sarah are two sides of the same coin. They are both fragile people, deathly afraid of putting their hearts on the line. While Rand avoids the vulnerability emotional attachment by attributing it to science, Sarah searches for the ultimate romantic connection to fill the void inside her left by the painful mistakes in her past. Their love is realistic and tangible, a refreshing change from the one-dimensional relationships so often seen in Hollywood.
The look of the film is an interesting departure as well. Its gray, bluish tones are broken up by quick flashes of microscopic chemical reactions, a C.S.I.-like technique that is employed to interesting effect. The pace is steady but slow-moving, which only serves to highlight the fact that there isn't much of a plot here beyond the initial high concept. At the end, the film isn't any closer to solving the mystery of love than it was at the beginning.
As the main couple, Livingston (the less-famous brother of Office Space and Band of Brothers star Ron Livingston) and Lloyd have a lot of chemistry, no pun intended. From the instant they meet on screen, it's obvious this pair will be making sparks by the film's end. It's just a shame that those sparks amount to nothing more than a wasted by-product of an experiment without conclusive results.
