After hearing good reviews from others, I was worried that I would go in with too high expectations and be disappointed. No fear! It was an excellent movie.
Let's start with the story as it first seems. Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a loner at high school, an outcast by choice. His only friend is another loner nicknamed The Brain who knows everything about everyone. When Brendan's ex-girlfriend Emily, whom Brendan still loves despite being dumped so she could climb higher on the social ladder at school, rings up sounding scared and confused and asking for help, Brendan throws himself back into the thick of high school and its cliques and secrets in an effort to help her out of a mess that she won't elaborate on. When he finds her dead two days after her phone call (not a spoiler - this is the first scene of the movie), the detective work, the menace and the double-crossing really begins.
If this sound less like a teen movie, and more like old-school Hollywood noir, that's because it's a really clever and intense attempt to blend the two. There's no swearing in the movie at all, but the kids get across their messages in dialogue that's informed by the language of hard-boiled detective and pulp novels, at time confusing, but always understandable from the context. Like when Brendan asks if The Brain knows who a certain person named The Pin is, The Brain replies in sharp quick patter, "Ask any dope rat where their junk sprang and they'll say they scraped it from that who scored it from this who bought it off so and after four or five connections the list always ends with the Pin. But I bet you got every rat in town together and said 'show your hands' if any of them've actually seen the Pin, you'd get a crowd of full pockets."
But don't fret. Even if you're not a fan of Hollywood noir, or if you don't know much about it, you can just sit back and enjoy a twisty mystery that's very stylishly filmed - the clever touches in the way it looks and sounds and moves. If you are a fan though, it's even more fun on a meta level, as you identify the usual tropes and see how they play out in a high school setting. Brendan, of course, is the world-weary detective in the mould of Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade; Lukas Haas' plays his shady character, The Pin, with the slick style of the old gangsters, with his cane a nice touch as well as being more than an affectation; Laura, the popular girl at school with the status and money and connections, has the brains and the beauty to be the ambigous femme fatale role. And all the minor characters have their place in moving the story along at a zipping pace, while setting up some really funny scenes that break up the inherent sadness in the mystery of Emily's death, while adding to the clues at the same time.
It's very well done, and even when characters are familiar and their arcs are familiar, the path between A and B is enjoyable that it doesn't matter if you know whodunnit, really. Because the journey, and being towed along like Brendan is through that journey into the seedy underworld of this non-descript high school, is the fun and interesting part, and that comes across so well in the film.
related reading >> Hard-boiled high, an article on two teen-noir features on at the moment, Brick and Veronica Mars
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