Donnie Darko

Morbid, Eighties surrealism. Lovely

The press kit for Donnie Darko requests critics not to reveal any major plot points, which leaves me slightly baffled. What exactly, in Richard Kelly's woozy, anxious delirium of a film, qualifies as a plot point per se, as opposed to a momentary shift in the overall strangeness of its imagery? Would it spoil your pleasure, for example, if I told you that the teenage hero wakes up one morning to find that an airliner engine has crashed through the roof of his house? Or that he receives visitations from a baleful creature named Frank, who manifests himself in a fake-fur costume and skull-like rabbit mask? Or that Donnie knows when the world is going to end, to the exact second? I think I can get away with revealing this much, because the film's real pleasures lie in the expanse of everyday mundanity that surrounds such florid islands of weirdness. Donnie Darko is a film about a brilliant, tormented, imaginative young loner, and given that writer-director Richard Kelly was only 26 when he made this debut feature, then the film may conceivably be meant as some sort of autobiographical cri de coeur. If it is, then all credit to Kelly that Donnie Darko is in no sense morbidly self-aggrandising – morbid, yes, but the way I like it. Kelly has a strange mind – although, to be honest, not nearly as strange or original as acclaim had it when the film first screened in Sundance early last year. Donnie Darko almost too neatly fits the profile of what well-honed, relatively commercial American indie surrealism might look like in 2002. You hesitate to mention the name, but there's clearly a David Lynch-shaped career niche among the opportunities on offer to young American directors, and Kelly has gone for it adeptly, perhaps a little ruthlessly.

Kelly's film is essentially an exercise in that quintessentially 1980s genre of US cinema, the Suburban Surreal – a cycle given its papers of respectability by Lynch's Blue Velvet (though arguably kick-started by A Nightmare on Elm Street). These films showed how the bland complacency of American small-town life concealed a "dark underbelly" (to use the buzz phrase of the time) of nightmare perversity. Other key exhibits were the comic-book schlocker Parents; The Stepfather, a prime example of unhappy-families Gothic; and the unsurpassed high-school-as-hell black comedy Heathers. Kelly's film reveals its roots from the start, in slo-mo scenes of Donnie's dad clearing leaves, kid sister trampolining, Donnie smiling eerily to himself as he cycles along tidy autumn streets. It's not long either before we see that central motif of the genre, the row of symmetrically arranged lawn sprinklers.

It seems only yesterday that the genre was thriving, so it's startling to find a film already harking back to it as earlier generations might have taken It's a Wonderful Life as a model. The film is set in 1988, with Reagan about to be succeeded by Bush mark one and a doomed Michael Dukakis fighting his corner. Kelly is in no way nostalgic about the Eighties themselves, only about a time when venturesome US film-makers were sharp-sighted enough to see that America had reverted to an unwitting parody of its Fifties self (Eisenhower-era kitsch was very much the Eighties thing). The film is refreshingly light on period pop-culture gags, aside from a tiresome riff about the sex life of Smurfs. Kelly actually uses a Tears For Fears song dead straight, sung to mournful piano by a Michael Stipe soundalike, over a Kieslowski-like montage of assorted characters pondering destiny; it's surprisingly poignant.

The film's big selling point is its spooked teenage metaphysics, but amid the business about wormholes, time travel and portents of apocalypse, Donnie Darko is a brittle reading of mid-American culture. The real horror lies not in Donnie's grisly nocturnal visions, but the daylight pastel idiocy peddled by New Age guru Jim Cunningham, gamely played in the film's only piece of novelty casting by quintessential Eighties Plastic Man, Patrick Swayze. Cunningham's spiritual snake oil promises its consumers that they can banish fear – clearly a bad idea for Kelly, who is more than committed to fear's creative possibilities.

For all his disturbance, Donnie is the only one who dares expose Cunningham as a fraud (and inadvertently, as far worse). The misfit girl (Jena Malone) with whom Donnie has a chaste courtship tells him his name sounds like "some kind of superhero" and that's really what he is: an amiable and reluctant terrorist who unfailingly cuts through the crap and reveals the world in all its oppressive idiocy. Kelly tends to tell us things that we already know about the American right and its urge to shut down independent minds, and his satire can be plain heavy-handed: the school's resident fundamentalist demagogue (Beth Grant) is nothing if not Miss Gulch from The Wizard of Oz reborn a snippy, self-righteous cretin who thinks Graham Greene is an actor on Bonanza.

Even so, Kelly's real skill may be as a social satirist rather than a Lynchian mindfuck artist. His really interesting move here is to step away from the surrealism of the Eighties school, which was invariably about the madness of home and family, and actually make Donnie's folks, conservatives though they are, perfectly charming, tender, and likeable. "How does it feel to have a wacko for a son?" Donnie laments. "It feels wonderful," smiles Mom, played with commanding warmth by Mary McDonnell.

Kelly is good at casting. Donnie is Jake Gyllenhaal, a young man whose face has somehow been crammed with too much meat and muscle; though he's a little too fond of glowering darkly, his Donnie is one of those rare screen adolescents who really looks as if he sweats too much in the wrong places, a Mr Hyde to Tobey Maguire's gentle Jekyll. Jake's sister Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Donnie's wry, flirty sister, while less convincingly, Drew Barrymore, who executive-produced, swanks around looking sourly ironic as her idea of a sexily bespectacled English teacher.

In its forced eccentricity, Donnie Darko is nowhere near as distinctively warped as, say, Being John Malkovich or The Royal Tenenbaums. Kelly really dilutes his effect by throwing in goofy effects like speeded-up motion and a digital hallucination that has people sprouting transparent tendrils from their chests (unless, of course, Kelly is being hyper-smartarse and it's a homage to early rough CGI, as in The Abyss – but it still looks tacky).

The Escher-style popular metaphysics I can take with a pinch of salt. But bearing in mind that it was first screened long before 11 September, Donnie Darko does have a certain timeliness, both in its apprehension of catastrophe (though that has been a hardy perennial in the annals of screen paranoia) and in its picture of the systematic closing of the American mind. Not only is Richard Kelly's film a sharp antidote to the recent banalities of commercial high-school farce, but it's an American teenage comedy genuinely motivated by rage, with a rebel hero who's actually an intellectual. These days, that's about as subversive as it gets.

j.romney@independent.co.uk