Ray Pride

If John Hughes were so bold as to make "Magnolia," after reading Philip K. Dick while tripping, the result wouldn't be one-tenth as good as "Donnie Darko," writer-director Richard Kelly's bold American original, a 1988-set teen satire that offers up the dissonant spectacle of twenty-eight days in the life of your essential suburban paranoid-schizophrenic teen (Jake Gyllenhaal). Kelly's ambitious, tonally insolent script prompts laughs, but also a very precise and tactile horror that did not exist when the film was produced. It's not too much to warn you: watch out for that falling jet engine. Watch out for philosophies of destruction. Watch out for those who reinvent your words to their own ends. Watch out for what voices tell you, whether in the classroom, the street or in your aching head. Listen, too, to Kelly's use of music, from Michael Andrews' Satiesque score to the best use yet of Joy Division's "Love With Tear Us Apart" to illustrate the hormonal surges of thrilling, self-important, delusional young romance. (For someone who was little-brother age when the music came out, Kelly makes splendid pop fizz from the likes of Tears for Fears' "Head Over Heels" and Duran Duran's anachronistic "Notorious.") The performances are marvels of empathy, including Gyllenhaal, all glorious angst, as the teen terrorist whose hallucinations intimate he may be a savior or merely a superhero; real sister Maggie Gyllenhaal as his down-to-earth sibling, whose sly buck-toothed smile deserves a song of its own; Mary McDonnell as his kind but wine-sated mom; Drew Barrymore as the well-meaning teacher who provides the moral justification for Donnie's nocturnal missions; and Jena Malone as the tiny young girl with secrets that may be larger than his. 111m. Panavision.

"Donnie Darko" plays Saturday, Monday and Wednesday-Thursday at the Film Center. See Short Runs.

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