Family. More specifically, the film chronicles the things that people (all of us) do and with each other in the name of "family", for the sake of "family", to accomplish a sense of "family". Some of these things are beautiful and sacred; but then we also do horrible, abusive, and profane things to each other. All of these things we do in the name of "family." The idea(l) of family engenders righteousness and cruelty; it elicits the best in humans, and it excuses the worst that our species has to offer.
So this film documents a fictive kinship system created in large measure by several member's of American society's caste of undesirables--crackheads, junkies, hookers, thieves, and drug dealers. Together and individually they work toward achieving a sense of connectedness, a feeling that they're a part of something bigger and, quite honestly, more beautiful than their individual selves. In accomplishing this nearly universal human objective, they deploy techniques that range from empathy to physical brutality.
This is not a film about crack cocaine, although everyone who appears in the movie does smoke or inject it. Most of them use heroin, too. They work very hard to acquire the substance that they use to treat their illness--addiction. But the things they must do (rob, cheat, steal, lie, etc.) put them at odds with the law and with prevailing community norms. The deeper problem, though, is that their very illness--which is what propels them to do these things--puts them at odds with "mainstream" society's moral code. The addiction itself has been criminalized through the punishment of the actions they take to treat the illness.
Crack cocaine is incidental, in and of itself. When you watch this film, imagine the substance of crack cocaine to be more of a process, a physical manifestation of human activity, people doing things to and with each other cooperatively and competitively. As one of the subjects in the film said to me during production, "crack isn't any one thing; it's a lot of things ... most of all, it's a way of life."
