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" IT BEGINS WITH A CRYPTIC, handwritten note: a date, a time, and a nearby street corner, at which location stands one of the few remaining pay phones in town. This classic communique&amp;#039; is slipped not beneath a door or into a coat pocket, however, but through the grille of our hero&amp;#039;s locker, where he retrieves it between classes. Emotional confrontations we&amp;#039;re accustomed to seeing set in cheap gin joints take place instead out on the football field; physical showdowns have been shifted from the dockside to the student parking lot. There&amp;#039;s even an imposing authority figure around to issue repeated, sure-to-be-ignored warnings about thevalue of leaving well enough alone. His nameplate reads ASST. VICE PRINCIPAL. Rarely does one see a debut feature as singular and knowing as Rian Johnson&amp;#039;s Brick, which received a special prize for &amp;quot;originality of vision&amp;quot; (shared with Me and You and Everyone We Know) at last year&amp;#039;s Sundance Film Festival. In most respects, originality isn&amp;#039;t exactly Brick&amp;#039;s forte; like Miller&amp;#039;s Crossing, it&amp;#039;s a scrupulously loving facsimile of the Dashiell Hammett template, complete with a stoic investigator, threatening thugs, tempting femmes fatales, obscure motivations, indecipherable plot twists, and a beautiful, dead blond. But by setting it in high school, Johnson succeeds in reinvigorating two moribund genres at once. At Sundance, some dismissed Johnson&amp;#039;s innovation as little more than an attention-grabbing stunt, akin to the theater group that relocates Shakespeare&amp;#039;s Comedy of Errors to the Iraqi-Syrian border. It&amp;#039;s not as random as it seems, though. Adolescence is the time in our lives during which our identities are most fluid. For all the lip service paid to chemistry and trig, high school is essentially a four-year program in trying on different hats, and the deliberate construction of a social persona durable enough for adulthood. And yet most American movies set in high school, eager to pander to teens and their disposable income, blithely ignore the strange, artificial atmosphere that permeates those hallways and classrooms. Granted, there have been a handful of worthy exceptions. More than ten years ago, Amy Heckerling took the basic plot of Jane Austen&amp;#039;s Emma--busybody dedicates herself to molding homely new friend in her own image, fails to recognize soul mate standing right in front of her--and manhandled it into Beverly Hills High, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Seen in retrospect, Clueless has its problems--chief among them the casting of the blatantly hunky Paul Rudd in the Mr. Knightley role--but for all its scatterbrained buoyancy, the film&amp;#039;s examination of adolescent mores through the prism of the very adult (and anachronistic) world of Austen gives it a heft unique among teen flicks of that era. Adapting great works of literature is one path to a compelling alternate universe, but other superlative high school films have conjured up an impressive degree of alienation from scratch. Some went the retro-nostalgic route: Richard Linklater in Dazed and Confused (and, before him, George Lucas in American Graffiti) obsessively re-created his own experience, using intricate period detail to create a striking amalgam of the familiar and the strange. Wes Anderson&amp;#039;s Rushmore, ostensibly set in the present, seems to be taking place in a hermetic world where the British Invasion was never repelled and Jacques Cousteau carries more cultural weight than Jay-Z. But no such easy signifiers can be found in Heathers, arguably the most aggressively stylized high school movie ever made. Virtually inventing its own language (&amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s your damage?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;C&amp;#039;mon, it&amp;#039;ll be very&amp;quot;) and ramping up teen cliquishness to a truly absurd level, Heathers pushes the genre almost to its breaking point, culminating in a chilling diary entry that both fulfills the nihilistic promise of movies dating back to Rebel Without a Cause and paves the way for Columbine: &amp;quot;My teen-angst bullshit now has a body count.&amp;quot; Brick begins with a corpse: a young woman, played by Lost&amp;#039;s Emilie de Ravin (seen alive in flashbacks), lying facedown in a shallow pool of water just outside a cavernous drainage tunnel on the outskirts of an anonymous California neighborhood. Her ex-boyfriend, Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), finds her body, hides it, and decides to do some digging. What follows is anything but a cute pastiche. Reading the synopsis at Sundance last year, I braced myself for a slightly older take on Bugsy Malone, Alan Parker&amp;#039;s little-kid gangster parody. Instead, Johnson plays things almost entirely straight, treating the various conventions and archetypes with infinite respect. Characters sport iconic names like the Brain (Matt O&amp;#039;Leary), Tugger (Noah Fleiss), and the Pin (Lukas Haas); everybody, regardless of age, speaks in the clipped, overdetermined cadence of classic film noir. And yet you never feel as if you&amp;#039;re watching kids playing dress-up. Or, rather, you do, but it hardly seems like fun and games. These teens mean business. In interviews, Johnson has stressed that he set Brick in high school primarily as a way of avoiding the traditional iconography of detective fiction: the fedoras, the trench coats, the shadowy alleyways. And there&amp;#039;s no question that he could have made an adult noir had he wanted to. Indeed, his screenplay is so satisfyingly clever, and his direction so effortlessly evocative, that I&amp;#039;m inclined to believe he can do anything he chooses. But there&amp;#039;s something almost unbearably poignant about the sense of grim purpose that envelopes Brick, about its juxtaposition of the byzantine codes of pulp fiction and the question of where to sit at lunch. It&amp;#039;s the rare movie willing to acknowledge that life never seems more momentous, perplexing, and fraught with danger than it does at 17. It&amp;#039;s as solid and heavy as its title. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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