Dark side of teendom

Donnie Darko is all loose ends. But if they'd been neatly tied up, it wouldn't be half so intriguing. I hardly know how to describe it, a sure sign of something that's going to be an instant cult. Youth is what it has plastered hormonally all over it, the sort of youth JD Salinger summed up for a different, now distant generation. Youth that's damned for being young, confused by the choices life offers, misunderstood by its elders, believing it will live for ever, but often wishing death would come and claim it, if possible before exam time.

It's not often an American-made, independent film gives you all this, and more, subsumed into a comic-cosmic view of the dark side of teendom. Donnie is not your average American kid.

Jake Gyllenhaal may not look it, but inside his template suburban family he's a borderline personality: he sleepwalks; he goes to a shrink (Katharine Ross); and thanks to the tip-off from an imaginary companion who looks less like the floppy-eared six-foot rabbit that Donniecalls Frank than a horned entity that Milton would call the Devil, he sees the future. It tells him the world will end in 28 days.

Donnie's own life nearly ends when a mysterious aircraft engine crashes through his bedroom ceiling; fortunately, he's out on his nocturnal rambles.

Everyone in high school and the community is slightly askew, or simply screwy: an old, old lady nicknamed Dr Death turns out to have written a Steven Hawking-like book on time travelling; Donnie's English teacher (played by producer Drew Barrymore) is a subversive liberal who teaches her class a Graham Greene text, The Destructors, which says the world must be destroyed in order to be recreated; the school principal is a bigoted PC zealot.

Lessons don't help Donnie solve life's mysteries and multiple-choice test papers are poor cribs for the metaphysics he feels shapes his ends. When he asks his science teacher an unorthodox question, the guy clams up: "If I answered, I'd lose my job."

The repression of Reaganite conformity is subverted by Donnie's "shadow" - the side of his nature that propels him to violent extremes, from answering back to committing arson.

Richard Kelly's direction plays visually with our perception of time, slowing down or accelerating the pace of life, and ultimately brings Donnie to the point where life for him is going to be either an epiphany or an epitaph. Or possibly both. The makers of Donnie Darko claim that "every moment in the story, every little character and every set-piece is there for a reason" and "means something".

All of which invites us to make it mean something; and on such uphill efforts of interpretation the movie-buff energies of the youth-cult audience are going to be expended.

An old stager like myself, who once found Holden Caulfield enough to handle, may be excused for ducking out of such Sisyphean toil. "What does it all mean?" Donnie asks himself, as most kids do, until experience compels them to ask: "Is this all there is?"