The storm after the calm

A story of death and time travel, 'Donnie Darko' flopped in the US, but became a cult hit on this side of the Atlantic - and now it's back, writes Danny Leigh

Ithe solitude of a cinema, there are still times when it's obvious what the whole audience is thinking. Don't go in the basement. Watch out for the shark.

So it was with Donnie Darko. From its very first scene of a freaked-out teenager waking on an empty hilltop road at dawn, before cycling back into a lush, suburban morning with an unknowable grin etched on his face, you could sense every mind in the place silently uniting in one question: what exactly is this then? I'm not sure I ever got the whole answer. But part of it, at least, was clear. It was a story of young love, time travel and, encompassing both, that same mysterious kid, Donnie (played by the bleary Jake Gyllenhaal), a sleepwalker and semi-reformed arsonist in small-town Virginia circa 1988.

Not that sleepwalking was his only nocturnal pastime. There were the visits from Frank - a monstrous, 6ft talking rabbit warning in creepy, Darth Vaderish tones of the imminent end of the world. Which was precisely what seemed to be under way when a stray jet engine promptly fell from the sky and crushed Donnie's family home.

So that was the story, and the film wrapped around it was (whatever else) pretty much a masterpiece. It was also the UK's surprise hit of 2002, a smash whose ardent fanbase helped found an ever-swelling reputation. So much so that now, two years later, a director's cut is to be released, the preserve of time-honoured classics. There will be additional footage, a buffed-up soundtrack and what its now 29-year-old writer-director, Richard Kelly, calls "new layers of information, ambiguity and mystery".

The movie was never short of those. Driven by its own wired internal logic, its narrative twisted into a puzzle that audiences delighted in trying to crack. Yet that wasn't the whole picture. At first, Donnie Darko was something else entirely - a disaster.

It was late October, 2001, and the film had just opened in America. Reviews, squeezed into pages not given over to 9/11 and anthrax in the mail, were polite, if baffled. But at the handful of cinemas playing host to Kelly's debut, business was somewhere between funereal and nonexistent. By the time it limped away from its theatrical run and into Blockbuster, it had made a sliver over $500,000: 10 per cent of its production costs.

Anyone searching for reasons need not look far. Stumbling into US cinemas in the wake of the attacks on the twin towers, audiences weren't yet ready for a meditation on death and metaphysics involving planes as sudden tools of destruction. After all, why seek out talking rabbits warning of the end of the world when it already seemed to be happening?

"It was a really upsetting time for all of us involved with the movie," the affable Kelly says. "Just getting it distributed had been a struggle, so I knew the typical industry executive felt it would never connect with anyone. And at that point it felt like they'd been right. But looking at it now, the fact that it came out in the middle of this chaos had a definite role in that." But apocalypse or no, maybe this first sad chapter in Donnie's strange trajectory was just what happens when an unknown director offers up a story this odd without a wall of marketing or, crucially, a major star. Gyllenhaal may now be the chiselled hero of the likes of The Day After Tomorrow, but back in 2001 the glow of his celebrity would barely have illuminated a shoebox.

The result was what looked like a premature, but conclusive demise. Until, a year later, the film arrived in a largely oblivious Britain for what should have been a few days of scattered blank expressions in a couple of London art cinemas. Critics were, once more, as bemused as impressed. But this time, when it opened, people came. And they kept doing so.

Enough so that rather than shuffling out of cinemas after a week, the film expanded out of the capital and around the country. Within a fortnight, Kelly's movie had made half as much money again as in its entire US run. Six weeks later, 300,000 tickets had been sold. More remarkable still, this triumph was based almost wholly on word of mouth - the unfakeable, ever-snowballing real thing. Suddenly, everyone you ran into had either just seen the movie, or was about to see it, or was about to see it again and tell their friends to do the same.

"It was incredibly pleasing and incredibly weird, both at once," Kelly says. "I'd always clung to the thought that somehow the movie would survive, but to see it do so well in another country was astonishing." Ask "Why Britain?" and he's flummoxed, however. "I guess there's a lot of material about teenagers and religion and what you could call the American mindset, and I think those ideas transcend America itself. But as for why Britain specifically, well," he bursts out laughing, "can you tell I don't know?" The quality of rival releases at the time may have helped (Red Dragon, anyone?). Perhaps the relatively stable UK of late 2002 was simply more receptive to a kid like Donnie than the wigged-out, traumatised US of a year earlier. Or maybe movies this good always find their audience eventually.

More likely, the key to its success was a convergence of all of these and a less tangible factor besides: a strange and Darko-esque something in the air. Because, by then, Kelly's movie had been granted a second life in its own country. The awestruck word of mouth behind the film's rise in Britain had, it seemed, also inched its way across the same US that had rejected the movie. Only, banished from the cinemas, Donnie had reached his acolytes by the scenic route of DVD and video. Yet the end product on both sides of the Atlantic was the same - a bona fide cult.

Inevitably, there were websites. The screenplay was published and eagerly received; eBay overflowed with posters, T-shirts and badges. And all of it was pored over by an ever-growing band of devotees, each drawn to exactly the same qualities that had helped doom it first time around - the hairpin swerves of tone between comedy, drama, sci-fi and horror and the plot that left a question hanging for every one it answered.

"I'd always conceived of the story as this dense experience," Kelly says, "because that's what I'm drawn to myself. My favourite books and movies always took time to process and required further investigation, so if I hadn't made the film, I'd probably be trying to figure it out along with everyone else."

The ripples of the film's extended life have ranged from the obvious (booming DVD sales) to the even-by-its-standards peculiar (the soundtrack's version of Tears for Fears' Mad World by LA bar singer Gary Jules randomly becoming last year's Christmas No.1). But however diverting the phenomenon of Donnie Darko, the pleasures of the actual film shouldn't be forgotten.

Witness Donnie himself - in superficially stock adolescent turmoil and yet a universe away from it. That's partly testament to Gyllenhaal (shudder at the thought of, say, the bloodless Tobey Maguire in the role).

Yet it also says much about Kelly's writing that he could play so artfully with the dread cliches of teenage alienation. Few characters can have had a more woeful influence on recent culture than The Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield, but in Kelly's hands the gifted but troubled boy-savant becomes a magnetic force once more.

Which is perhaps the film's real signature. After a while, Kelly's boundless imagination is a given - what's extraordinary is his renovation of the most clapped-out devices. Watch the film's first narcotic pan through the corridors of Donnie's high school - the endless lockers, weary principal, sniggering bullies - and it's as if you've never seen such exotica on film before.

Every now and then, you can discern a sinister hint of David Lynch. Otherwise, Kelly's operating in a world entirely his own. The film may brim with references to other movies,but they're less stylistic influences than loving homages to a ragbag of totems from 1980s cinema: Back to the Future, The Evil Dead, Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, ET - the Extra-Terrestrial.

"One of the most gratifying things," Kelly says, "is that kids, teenagers, love the film so much. Because there's that idea they can't deal with narrative sophistication, but in fact they instinctively handle what a lot of adults can't - that the film's about a high schooler who talks about the Smurfs and philosophy and metaphysics." Indeed, it's those co-existing opposites that underpin the whole movie. From the outset, its comedy is inspired, yet every time any other film would go for the belly laugh, Kelly instead amps up the sense of dignity and hidden depths.

Equally, for what is on many levels an arcane slice of sci-fi, never once does it lose touch with its human pulse - flawed, bizarre and stubbornly optimistic. And as such, in Kelly's words, "hopefully as relevant in 2104 as it is now". Few re-releases could be more valuable. Whatever Donnie Darko is, it will be some time before we see its like again. - (Guardian Service)

• Donnie Darko is showing at IFI, Dublin, from September 3rd