Brick

A version of this review appeared in The Age, August 10, 2006.

The title hits you at the outset: brief, blunt, enigmatic. The brick in Brick is a concrete object – it would spoil things to give too much away – but the word itself makes a perfect emblem for a movie built out of invented slang terms and cryptic messages, a sealed package that seemingly refuses to refer to anything outside itself.

At a pinch, it might even be a description of the rectangular movie screen. Making his debut with this remarkable high school mystery, the writer-director Rian Johnson treats each shot like a panel of a graphic novel: the camera locks onto the teenage actors from high and low angles as if simultaneously elevating them to gods and squeezing them in a vice.

Wider shots establish the locale, a low-lying Californian town dominated by highways, harsh sunlight, and solid blocks of institutional architecture; in this barren setting, the virtuosic fight scenes play out like live-action Road Runner cartoons, with the funniest sight gag involving one character's inability to see round corners.

The landscape may be mundane to the point of anonymity, but the film soon establishes its own set of fantasy conventions. For the most part, adults are invisible and irrelevant, while kids occupy the stock genre roles of wisecracking investigator, hired goon, or femme fatale.

Making use of another graphic novel technique, Johnson defines each character quickly in a few visual strokes. Played with total assurance by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the hero Brendan has his army jacket, spectacles, and unkempt fringe – props that suggest a defensive, watchful nature, only partly belied by his expert streetfighting skills and tough-guy attitude.

The Pin (Lukas Haas), who runs a drug ring from his mother's basement, appears initially in silhouette, wearing a black cape and flourishing a gold-handled cane; Brendan's offsider Brain (Matt O'Leary) wears heavier glasses and seems to be permanently stationed around the back of the school, where he maintains a mental database on the entire student population.

Beginning with the discovery of a corpse outside a lonely drain, the film unfolds as if in the mind of a lonely, arty kid in love with comic books and Dashiell Hammett novels, plodding between school and home while immersed in a private imaginary world.

Occasionally Johnson pushes artifice to the point of parody: called up to the vice-principal's office, Brendan behaves like a renegade private-eye faced with an irate police chief.

But the overall tone is more wistfully romantic than straightforwardly tongue-in-cheek. The safety-valve touches of humour only reinforce the film's commitment to its own irrational logic, even if they simultaneously suggest that the entire hardboiled mythology of film noir is a childish dream.

"Do you read Tolkien?" the Pin unexpectedly asks Brendan as they stand together on the beach at sunset, in one of the rare moments when the plot pauses for breath. The irony, of course, is that these characters might as well be Frodo and the Dark Lord Sauron for all the resemblance they bear to possible human beings.

Briefly, the Pin seems to catch sight of his own fictional nature, which doubles as the sense of exclusion commonly felt in adolescence, as if meaningful events were necessarily occurring somewhere else: reality in this movie exists literally on the horizon, where cars move down the highway beyond the football field, and the sun sets over the sea.