READIN', WRITIN' AND RUBBIN' OUT

REVIEWED - BRICK: WHAT might happen if you were to insinuate the language, mood and style of the noir thriller into an archetypal high school modelled on those in John Hughes's classic youth comedies? Well, you'd probably end up with something that looked sickeningly arch or just plain silly.

Rian Johnson, a young film-maker from southern California, originally set out to blend those two genres equally, but, quite wisely, has allowed the Hammett to completely overpower the Hughes.

Yes, the heroes of Johnson's naggingly effective, brilliantly titled first film are teenagers. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, star of Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin, appears as a wry, smart kid, who encounters any amount of twisty intrigue while searching for his missing girlfriend. Lukas Haas, long grown up since playing the title role in Witness, plays an evil young geek with a lair in his mother's basement. Along the way, amid the outbreaks of jarring violence, we encounter occasional reminders of their callowness. Haas's mother drops in to offer the boys cereal. When the villain requires a literary allusion to illustrate his situation, he turns to Tolkien rather than Kafka.

But the characters are so coolly articulate, and their daily concerns so momentous, that it becomes impossible to view them as youths. The heightened universe of Brick is uneasy, stagy and some dimensions distant from either our own or Mr Hughes's. Though Johnson wrote the film with particular locations in his hometown of San Clemente in mind, the bright, empty courtyards and spooky, olive interiors suggest some distant, lonely Planet of the Teens. In truth, the picture has more in common with Blade Runner than The Breakfast Club.

None of which is intended as criticism. Brick comes across as being very comfortable in its own unusual skin. As Gordon-Levitt investigates deeper, the plot, referencing elements of Hammett's Red Harvest, spins towards delicious incoherence. A body is located at one end of a drainage tunnel. Internal divisions in Haas's empire reveal themselves. Even if the characters didn't speak in their weird, off-kilter argot, the story might still be quite impossible to disentangle.

Never mind. Such insoluble conundrums did The Big Sleep no harm.