DONNIE DARKO []
An engaging, time-tripping Holden Caulfield. Running time: 105 minutes. Rated R (sex, profanity, drug use, violence). At the Empire, the First and 62nd, the Village East, others.
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‘DONNIE Darko” is the year’s most ambitious indie, a sprawling comic sci-fi fantasy that’s an awfully impressive writing-directing debut by 26-year-old Richard Kelly.
Yes, it’s got third-act problems – but most experienced filmmakers wouldn’t even attempt a film that’s so blackly funny, that so rapidly shifts genres and tone, and that layers late ’80s cultural references so thickly, from “E.T.” to Smurfs.
As his name suggests, teenage Donnie (movingly played by Jake Gyllenhaal, late of “Bubble Boy”) is a kind of superhero version of Holden Caulfield, who sees ectoplasm extensions from people’s chests (great special effects).
He discovers he has an ability to manipulate time after a huge airplane engine mysteriously lands in his bedroom – while he’s dozing on a golf course following a bout of sleepwalking.
Donnie is already notorious in the leafy suburb of Middlesex, Va. – he’s been on heavy medication ever since he tried to burn down an abandoned house.
But regular sessions with a psychiatrist (Katharine Ross) – during which he fondles himself and fantasizes about Christina Applegate of “Married With Children” while under hypnosis – aren’t really keeping his demons at bay.
In the month before George Bush the elder’s defeat of the hapless Michael Dukakis, Donnie is receiving orders from an imaginary, 6-foot-tall rabbit. The parochial high school he attends is flooded and there are other random acts of vandalism.
After the school calls in a smarmy self-help author (Patrick Swayze, who’s terrific) who reduces all emotions to “love and fear,” Donnie has a confrontation with the gym teacher (Beth Grant), which further confuses his befuddled parents (Mary McDonnell, Holmes Osborne).
Everything builds to a climax at a party on Halloween eve – and it’s here, with a visit to a theater showing a double-bill of “The Evil Dead” and “The Last Temptation of Christ” – that the film sprawls out of Kelly’s grasp.
It was a mistake, too, to cast co-producer Drew Barrymore as Donnie’s hippie English teacher, who gets into hot water for assigning a Graham Greene story about anarchistic youths.
She strikes the only false note in a fine ensemble cast that also includes a moving performance by Jena Malone as another troubled teen who befriends Donnie – surely one of the year’s most engaging screen creations, flaws and all.