“Maniac” is about an experimental psychoactive drug. Also, it sort of is an experimental psychoactive drug.

At your first dose, things go wonky, just a little, around the edges. You’re in a New York City that looks like today’s New York but isn’t. A winged “Statue of Extra Liberty” towers in the harbor. Humans rent themselves out in a turbocharged gig economy, while Muppet-like robots hustle chess games in the park. Tiny wheeled “poop bots” trudge the sidewalks cleaning up dog waste. (The subways — well, the subways are still recognizably lousy.)

On these retro-techno streets (basically, the future as imagined in 1980) we find Owen (Jonah Hill) and Annie (Emma Stone), two strangers who meet as subjects in a dodgy trial for psychiatric medication that promises to give its users’ subconsciouses a deep cleaning by inducing dangerous, therapeutic dreams.

At this point, “Maniac,” which appears on Netflix on Friday, ups the dosage and becomes something unstable, exhilarating and one-of-a-kind, a sci-fi pharmacological dystopian family-therapy dramedy.