Brick

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ****

Rian Johnson's Brick is a super debut, a bravura film that pulls off the pretentious set-up: a Raymond Chandler-esque mystery, updated, and set in an adolescent world. While it stumbles here and there (comes close to going on too long somewhere in Act III), and it is occasionally hard to catch all the hyper-teen-noir slang (a glossary is provided on the official web site), the film is nonetheless a treat.

It's also, dare I say it, the best film set and shot in California's Orange County that I can recall. It certainly captures that overdeveloped, under-souled landscape perfect. Why did no one think of an OC-noir before?

Joseph Gordon Levitt - getting farther and farther away from 3rd Rock from the Sun with each time out - follows up on his fine work in Mysterious Skin with another sharp, if occasionally mumbled, performance, as the nosy teen gumshoe mixed up in some very bad stuff. His character takes a licking and keeps on ticking. And Lukas Haas, in a bit of spot-on casting, is terrific as the young drug kingpin (who does business in his cheerful mom's basement), hobbling on a cane like a Sydney Greenstreet character, while Noah Fleiss is memorably creepy as hell as his disturbed right-hand man. In fact, like any good pulp detective story, the whole film is full of indellible characters who are remembered long after the lights go back up - while also helping to keep your eyes on the screen even as the plot itself sometimes loses momentum.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to think of Alan Parker's film Bugsy Malone - in which teens play adult roles as the sole inhabitants of a world (in that case, gangster era Chicago) - but Brick plays it less as a gimmick and more as a River's Edge-style exercise in adolescent estrangement. But what keeps the film from tripping up on pretentiousness (it does so only occasionally) is its sly sense of humor, both visually (dig the way Levitt snubs out Dode's (Noah Segan) annoying straw-flute, or the scene where Fleiss' thug keeps coming back to beat on Levitt) and, of course, verbally.

The film takes a bit of time to get accustomed to - as if we the audience were collectively given a new eyeglass prescription and have to adjust to seeing a certain way - stick with it. Brick is a breakout debut, and one of the best films of 2006.