Donnie Darko

What’s the Story?

In a cozy affluent suburb in October, 1988, Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal), a rebellious teen, smart but diagnosed with mental illness and sort of a misfit at school, is lured from his bedroom by a phantom wearing a grotesque, metal-masked rabbit costume. The rabbit, "Frank," tells him exactly when the world will end -- in 28 days. Meanwhile a shattering series of events disrupt Donnie's already-unsteady world, including young love with a new girl at school. A plane engine falls out of nowhere onto his house, a sympathetic English teacher (Drew Barrymore) is punished for her choice of literature in the class, a youth-mentoring positive-thinking guru (Patrick Swayze) brainwashes the community, visions of wormlike appendages emerge from people's chests, and a neighborhood crazy lady turns out to be an ex-nun scientist who researched time-travel and metaphysical cause-effect paradoxes. Got all that? More menacing visits from "Frank" the rabbit lead to a Halloween night revelation, and Donnie realizing his pivotal role in this weird, interconnected web of destiny.

Is It Any Good?

DONNIE DARKO was embraced as a genuinely oddball "cult" item almost instantly upon its unsuccessful theatrical release. Like most cult movies, it works well on numerous levels -- as a brainy piece of science-fiction, an ominous psychological thriller, a satire on suburban values, or a tragic drama of a doomed young rebel. If anything it goes a little overboard in making adults (especially teachers/faculty) look cowed or cravenly stupid compared with the unstable but intellectually brilliant Donnie, well played by Gyllenhaal as a guy who can be likeable, sympathetic, and scary all at once.

Though Donnie -- sometimes in a trance-state, sometimes consciously -- commits vandalism and lashes out, he's smart enough to sense the eerie time-warp pattern behind all the odd goings-on. And he's heroic enough to make a Christ-like sacrifice at the end, for the good of everyone else, when the "end of the world" comes. Though it's possible he never had a choice -- just the insight. But by making their hero a classic underdog teen trying to come to grips with society, rather than an adult, the filmmakers created a far more poignant tragi-comic-coming-of-age-giant-skull-faced-rabbit-horror drama. Can you name a better one?