If a stereotypical feel-good movie is like a cozy cashmere blanket - the kind of film that leaves the viewer feeling blissful on the couch as the credits roll and Bridget Jones finally kisses Mark Darcy, I probably should inform a team of qualified specialists that my own is about teenage alienation, suburban hypocrisy, apocalyptic dread, and a man in a bunny costume giving strict instructions about death. However, it also has a much better soundtrack.
Richard Kelly's "Donnie Darko" explored an alternative reality decades before Marvel movies and "Everything Everywhere All at Once" became symbols of multiverse pop culture. Its tree-lined streets, Halloween skies, and teenagers riding bicycles through the suburbs are a more eerie, melancholic outline of "Stranger Things" before Hawkins existed. It's a suburban fever dream about fate, madness, and expiration dates, a nightmarish physics puzzle infused with existential dread. But beneath all this cult-film weirdness, it's also a strangely uplifting story about a lonely, damaged kid who eventually finds his place in the world - and sacrifices himself to save it, against the backdrop of the best 80s alternative pop atmospherics.
As a nervous teenage outcast, Donnie faces all the usual problems you'd find in a typical John Hughes high school movie: bullies lurking in school hallways, well-meaning parents who have no idea who their son is, a claustrophobic feeling of suburbanism that ruins everything like rot beneath fresh paint. He rides his bicycle through it, as if trying to escape the ordinary. But he also experiences what might be psychotic delusions, recovers from almost dying, and carries the chemical melancholy that can make adolescence feel like a pressure cell.
Despite all this, Donnie emerges as the only person in his entire community who's willing to confront the forces of war, narrow-minded conservatism, and smiley hypocrisy embodied by Patrick Swayze's cunning, pedophilic self-help guru Jim Cunningham and his kidney-freezing, pompous culture-war foot soldier Kitty Farmer (the amazing Beth Grant). His refusal to smooth over the anti-intellectual nonsense they're peddling sets him apart as the clearest thinker in a community that operates on autopilot, despite all his problems. As the film progresses, he works on time travel and exposes the adult frauds around him. He even finds a way to accept his own death if it means the people he loves can avoid the (mostly terrible) fate that's introduced in the opening shots of the doomed tangential world presented in the film. He's nothing if not a superhero - as his eventual girlfriend Gretchen Ross points out at the beginning, saying his name sounds like one - though one built for outsiders, overthinkers, and lonely dreamers.
To illustrate the romantic, elegant incoherence Kelly plunders the 1980s like a velvet-gloved record store thief with exquisite taste and no interest in filler shelves. If the soundtrack had only Joy Division's cracked and brilliant Love Will Tear Us Apart and The Church's spine-chilling, otherworldly Under the Milky Way, it would still be one of the greatest movie music choices ever to grace a single film. The fact that such engaging bursts of pop serotonin like Echo & the Bunnymen's darkly magnificent The Killing Moon and Tears for Fears' shimmering, heart-pounding Head Over Heals also appear is almost like cheating. But these polished little miracles aren't just there to spoil our taste; Kelly uses them as time-activated emo-bombs, delivering payloads of nostalgia, foreboding, and teenage longing exactly when the film needs them most.
For those who've ever felt a little different, a little more neurodiverse, a little wild, the effect is as comforting as a warm hug from someone who knows you. The good guy here is the outsider riding through the suburbs with pop-lightning dreams, able to smell the stink of censored, reactionary nonsense like a truffle pig. The brillo-pad bad guys are the ones telling us to be quiet, stay inside the lines, and obey the script. Luckily, we can't hear them because we're too busy turning up the volume and riding our bicycles back home before sunrise. Beyond the Halloween driveways, under the sodium sky, with the intention of returning before dawn.
