I am the same age as Donnie Darko writer-director Richard Kelly (26), so his memories of the 1980s are temporally synchronized with mine. The film's titular hero is a little older than Kelly was in 1988, the year in which the tragicomic Donnie Darko takes place, but most of us junior high students felt more mature than we actually were back then due to the prevalence of teen culture. If I, like Kelly, were to write my eighties analogue, he would no doubt be an old enough character for a Brat Pack movie. But I don't need to know Richard Kelly personally to see that Donnie Darko is bigger than his alter ego: Donnie, a chronic sleepwalker on antidepressants, is awake to 1988 in a way that none of us were. He senses a world past due, heretofore unsaid prescience. To be fair, it's a skull-faced Easter Bunny named Frank who plants the seed of transition in Donnie's head: Donnie Darko reshapes Lewis Carroll's "Alice" books and is the first film since Edward Scissorhands to cast suburbia as Wonderland and be canny about it.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Donnie, a ruffled string bean with the same Cheshire grin as Tobey Maguire, a smile that advises bystanders of his weird streak. It is the dawn of Prozac; perhaps Donnie only looks happy because he's medicated. Frank is another possible pharmaceutical by-product--we've all heard tales of certain happy pills producing nightmare side effects. The Holy Grail of delusions, Frank, in an echoed hush that makes him sound like the narrator of all dreams, nightly doomsays the end of existence and coaxes Donnie into committing misdeeds. At first, Donnie's shrink (Katharine Ross) encourages him to engage with his "imaginary" friends, but when she moves on to hypno-counseling and Frank proves inextricable, Mr. and Mrs. Darko (Holmes Osborne and Mary McDonnell, who leave a lovely impression) are brought in and advised that Donnie needs an increased dosage. The stopgap miracle.

Donnie Darko, a tonal cross between Ang Lee and David Lynch, begins, for all intents and purposes, with a jet engine falling out of the sky and landing on the white-picket Darko residence, a freak occurrence that would have killed Donnie had he not been on one of his somnambulant strolls. In the October days that follow (intertitles count down to the apocalypse), Donnie receives similar ominous portents, including a whispered truism from century-old "Grandma Death," a fringe suburbanite known around town for checking her mailbox obsessively: "Everybody dies alone." For reasons too difficult (and spoilerish) to elucidate here, the sum of these messages inspires Donnie to investigate the theoretical physics behind time travel. That his research is relevant to the film's conclusion I guess qualifies Donnie Darko as science-fiction; I prefer to think of it in less genre-limiting terms, as social commentary with a metaphysical edge.

The film has its weaknesses, none of them, in my opinion, Kelly's penchant for grotesque ignoramuses, to which Donnie Darko's detractors may point. If a conservative female gym instructor (Beth Grant) and a Christian-tinged motivational speaker (Patrick Swayze, cast ironically) are there in large part to sanctify the protagonist, well, the same applies for Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee. The righteous pair also exemplifies the end opposite Donnie's therapist on the philosophical spectrum--they see human emotion as consisting of two distinct poles: fear and love. There was a jumble of terror that led to, and got suppressed by, the vacuity of faddish eighties thinking; with Reagan and Gorbachev threatening to bomb each other, (North) America covered its collective ear and intoned, "I'm not listening! I'm not listening!" Donnie finds himself in the most trouble after ripping prideful band-aids off uncertainty--his verbal smackdowns of Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee, for instance.

No, Donnie Darko's missteps are an unfortunate acting turn from executive producer Drew Barrymore--she gets to do her troubled eighties over as an intellectual, but both the character (an anti-censorship English teacher) and the performance are ill-conceived--and an excess of supporting parts. Donnie's friends get lost in the shuffle (though their Smurfs discussion single-handedly justifies the period setting), as does a rotund voyeur in a red tracksuit. While Jena Malone is not always convincing as a broken-home survivor, she complements Gyllenhaal in a physically essential way, the stasis to his electricity. Otherwise, Richard Kelly's hyphenate debut shows an already-expansive filmmaking vocabulary and bottomless imagination. He's fashioned a subtly nostalgic fantasia that, for its sincerity and genuine achievements of profundity, puts the comparable American Beauty to shame. That's the bottom line on Donnie Darko.

The best film with the weakest theatrical release of 2001, Donnie Darko has been swept up and rescued by Fox Video, whose VHS and DVD issues of the film I have both viewed. The latter presents Donnie Darko letterboxed at 2.35:1, enhanced for anamorphic displays. The transfer is nice but less than rigorous: there's some feeble contrast apart from Kelly's intentionally subdued blacks, and the print isn't spotless. (The resplendence of Steven Poster's cinematography shines through regardless.) More disappointing is the Dolby Digital 5.1 mix, if only because I originally saw the film in 2-channel and was left with the impression that I had missed out on spectacular sound. Audio is concentrated in the front mains save for a wormhole that visits Donnie's kitchen late in the proceedings; the bass rarely pipes up with any attitude.

The disc's extras are generous, though a part of me wishes I hadn't indulged in the commentary by Kelly and star Jake Gyllenhaal, as Kelly provides definitive interpretations of the piece (it is a straight sci-fi, he insists) and Gyllenhaal swathes a lot of his pride in Donnie Darko in goofball detachment. Kelly also tends to distance himself, somewhat ironically, from the film's milieu--anyone who can write a Smurf debate as well as Kelly remembers the name of Smurfs creator Peyo without a struggle, but Kelly feigns one. (Meanwhile Gyllenhaal mocks--good-naturedly--the Tears for Fears song "Head Over Heels," which plays over the audacious montage at Donnie's school.)

For all their idiosyncrasies, Kelly and Gyllenhaal have recorded a yak-track beyond preferable to the second included, a group dialogue between producer Sean McKittrick, crew members Karen Pomeroy (sp?), Gretchen Ross (sp?), and Kitty Farmer, and still others whose names are lost in a hailstorm of giggles. 02/22/02 - Call me Leonard Shelby: having finished my second viewing of Donnie Darko just moments before putting on this commentary track, I failed to connect names like "Karen Pomeroy" to characters from the film--cast members Barrymore, Malone, and Grant winkingly announce themselves by their on-screen alter egos. Other participants include Kelly again, producer Nancy Juvonen (Barrymore's partner in Flower Films), McDonnell, Osborne, Ross, and James Duval. My sincere apologies to Mr. Kelly and co. for this humiliating gaffe. Yes, this is one of those commentaries in which laughter directed at in-jokes is the only thing on the agenda. Skip it, as the breathers are unenlightening attempts to analyze Donnie Darko, anyway. I far more enjoyed the deleted/extended scenes section, which features twenty clips with optional commentary from Kelly, among them a bit of foreshadow at an underdressed arcade and a revelation from Donnie's shrink that, however startling, would've been a cop-out.

Rounding out the disc are five TV spots, the smashing, if bean-spilling, theatrical trailer, Kelly's beautiful video for Gary Jules' cover of Tears for Fears' "Mad World" (in crisp stereo), eleven cast filmographies, nine crew biographies, the Donnie Darko website (a rather muted experience this way, flipping through it like a book), Kelly's liner notes for the upcoming soundtrack CD of Michael Andrews' score, the complete "Cunning Visions" infomercials, galleries of convincing faux book covers, the cue cards telling the parable "His Name is Frank," production stills, and conceptual art, and twelve fascinating 1-page chapters of "Roberta Sparrow"'s The Philosophy of Time Travel that are unfortunately a chore to read, even off a large television screen, due to tiny, jagged text.-Bill Chambers