It’s duck soup for you yegs.” Come again?
Staring Contest: Joseph Gordon-Levitt (middle) transforms into a leading man as a high school gumshoe. The disappearance of his ex leads him to local drug boss the Pin (Lukas Haas, left).
High school movies, as a rule, feature 30-year-old actors speaking in an odd language peppered with misfired new slang. If the kids in “Brick” are hard to understand, though, it’s because their affected speech emulates a style far, far removed from the halls of their sunny San Clemente, Calif., school — that of characters in noir films of the ’40s and ’50s, straight out of Dashiell Hammett novels.
High school and noir? If debutante director Rian Johnson wants to marry odd couple genres, might as well go for sci fi and period drama, right? And yet, despite the initial sense of absurdity and occasional reminders breaking up the dark drama with hilarity (some intentionally, others questionably so), the formula makes sense. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the loner/gumshoe Brendan; he’s truly too cool for school, so he’s taken to aeating by himself behind the portables. But when Brendan’s ex-girlfriend (Emilie de Ravin of “Lost”) makes a mysterious plea for his help before disappearing, his unresolved flame turns him into a hardboiled detective, working his way around the school’s stratified cliques and into its underbelly of drug deals and violence. It’s a world thick with references — he finds an accomplice in Rubicks-cube-wielding buddy the Brain; a decadent actress in the queen of the drama crowd; a meddlesome cop in the vice principal; a Godfather-wannabe in the local drug ring’s top dog the Pin (Lukas Haas); a hot-headed brute in the Pin’s right-hand man and even a breathless femme fatale in the jock-dating rich girl (Nora Zehetner of “Everwood”).
But what ties the genres best is not the overt, deadpan appropriation of noir standards. Brendan’s ex puts it best when she tries to convince him to let her go and leave her to her new “upper-crust” druggie friends: “I’m in a different world now.” All of these kids are in their own self-contained worlds, worlds built upon treacherous allegiances and role-playing. They’re dead serious, all the time — because that’s what high school is. Looking in, it’s easy to laugh when Brendan discovers the 26-year-old Pin (described as “really old”) sitting in his office — the basement of his mother’s house — with his back turned to the door, evil-genius-fashion, look complete with black cape and cane. Or when the Pin’s oblivious mother cheerfully serves Brendan and the high-school thugs who’ve just roughed him up a nice glass of orange juice. Or when, still in black getup, the Pin sits on the beach under a perfect polychrome sunset, asking Brendan if he’s ever heard of Tolkien: “You know, the hobbit books? His descriptions are really good. They make you want to be there.” It’s all hilariously pathetic, but the peril of these teenagers’ lives is very real, as Brendan demonstrates by repeatedly provoking graphic, raw fights.
Johnson smartly crafts this separate world by cutting out the classrooms, the crowded halls and nearly all adult interference. The scope is narrowed to the drab settings of these nearly invisible dramas — the school parking lot, the empty football field, a phone booth, a water drainage tunnel. Lonely places — lonely as Brendan, who pushes himself deeper into a living inferno as much out of masochism as love. He’s always sharp, always brave, yet his despair makes him eminently likeable, and Gordon-Levitt’s intelligent charm probably has something to do with it, too. Between this role and that of a teenage hustler in 2004’s “Mysterious Skin,” the former “3rd Rock from the Sun” kid proves he’s got the range required for the big time.
The film’s pretension, though, is at the same time its biggest asset — alternately making it coolly clever or hilariously tongue-in-cheek — and its inherent flaw. The speedy delivery packs delectable suspense, but the rushed explanations aren’t terribly satisfying, nor the characters’ motivations sufficiently mined. What it offers is an awkward, mesmerizing mood — out of time, out of place and definitely out of mind. Oh, yeah, remember high school?
