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The director of the high-school head-trip Donnie Darko talks to Mark Olsen
"Maybe Catcher in the Rye as told by Philip K. Dick," is how 26-year-old writer/director Richard Kelly describes, when pressed, his extraordinarily unclassifiable debut feature, Donnie Darko. A mixture of adolescent angst, sci-fi fantasy, sexual repression, and mental illness, the film wants to be the last word, striving to be the totalizing, all-questions-answered masterstroke teenagers awkwardly yearn for, and, like all teenagers, it also wants to remain teasingly enigmatic and undefined. Just as it does for its eponymous protagonist - a high-schooler who may be seriously deranged, on the brink of saving the world, or perhaps both -- every misstep eventually leads to an inviting and unexplored path and every mistake proves to be the only possible choice.
If last year's Ginger Snaps mapped the trials of female adolescence through the bloody body-- shock and revulsion of the horror film, then Donnie Darko applies the mind-warping possibilities of science fiction to teenage male development, exploring alternate worlds hidden within the fabric of everyday adolescent reality. Set in a generically affluent suburb called Middlesex during October 1988, the film opens on Donnie (played with masterful opacity by Jake Gyllenhaal) curled up in the middle of a mountain road as dawn breaks, his bicycle lying nearby. He awakes from...