Parents of teenage daughters worry most about anorexia, they say, and above all else, teenage boys' parents fear paranoid schizophrenia. And it is perhaps a lonely young man's mental illness - or perhaps something else entirely - that is being mythologised in this startlingly original film by the 27-year-old debutant writer-director Richard Kelly. Is it a horror film? A black comic parable of Generation X angst? A teen drama with a psycho edge? If not, what the hell is it? Looking in my notebook, I see I have scribbled: "David Lynch, The X Files, Prozac Nation, My So-Called Life, Ghost World." Donnie Darko has the conventional leafy-suburbia-plus-high-school setting of films such as Carrie and Halloween, to which it glancingly alludes. But none of these quite nails the genre, and perhaps more importantly the tone of this very strange movie.
Jake Gyllenhaal is Donnie Darko, the very weird son of regular-issue uptight parents. That's not a nickname; it's his actual name. There are conventional generation conflicts and dramas over the dinner table. The father gets mad at Donnie's elder sister for claiming that she's going to vote for Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis (it's set in 1988), and Donnie's younger sister is trying out for some nationwide talent contest as a member of her school dance troupe, Sparkle Vision, whose faintly unwholesome, sexy routine we see later - shades of the dance sequence in American Beauty.
But it is sleepy-eyed, introspective Donnie who is causing his mom and dad the most heartache. Despite having good grades, he is going off the rails in a pretty big way: staying out all night, sleepwalking and waking up God only knows where - on the road, or on the fairway of a spiffy local golf club where bemused players ask him to move on. Donnie's life is touched by fate when he happens to be out of his bedroom on the night a 747 engine comes crashing down from the sky through the roof. If he had been there, it would have killed him. What's odd is that there is no sign of the plane this engine came from. What's odder is that he cheated death because he had been told to get out by a 6ft rabbit - no, make that a 6ft figure in a rabbit costume - who appears to Donnie in a vision, telling him the world is going to end.
It's very different from Jimmy Stewart and Harvey. Donnie hardly wants to tell anyone about his scary new rabbit friend. But we know that he has, in the tight-lipped words of his family, "not been taking his medication recently". His visits to a psychologist, played by Katharine Ross, become a fiasco when she puts him in a hypnotic trance and he insists on talking about sex, no matter what the question, and starts unbuttoning his jeans, about to masturbate: a wonderful moment of high embarrassment.
Kelly endows Donnie's existence with a dreamlike quality: there is a sense that he should actually have died and that he now inhabits a bizarre and often very funny afterlife. In school, a local worthy from the PTA objects to his English teachers setting a book by Graham Greene, because it is a work of vicious pornography. "Do you even know who Graham Greene is?" snaps one parent. "Oh please! I think we've all seen Bonanza," she replies majestically.
The school allows preposterous inspirational speaker Jim Cunningham - a very creepy performance from Patrick Swayze - more or less to colonise the school's counselling services, with his endless exhortations to escape "fear". Donnie falls in love with Gretchen, a girl from out of state who has moved to this new town with her mother, both having changed their names because they are being stalked by her ex-boyfriend: a pleasingly jaded, postmodern detail.
It is when Donnie starts seeing, or hallucinating, the "wormholes" in time that his physics teacher has told him about that the movie becomes slightly unmoored from the very sharp and unsettling mixture of psychological nightmare and astute social comment, and moves into a slightly cheesy fantasy world, complete with the speeded-up visions of skies beloved of pop videos. And it is in this final act that the movie loses some of its disturbing edge.
But how stimulating to see a film that really can be scary and believes in its own scariness, scariness with a point - not like the preprogrammed generic film-school pseudo-shockers we've been offered recently. The scariness is rooted in compassion: you are just afraid for Donnie. Jake Gyllenhaal's performance can be mannered, but it is undoubtedly right for the part, and Kelly's final narrative flourish, winding the narrative skein round to the beginning, has its own twisted, dreamy logic. This resolution works as an anguished metaphor: there's almost a kind of thanatos , a yearning for death in the mind of the sufferer. Donnie does not want to be terrified of his demons any more, delusional or otherwise, and doesn't want them to poison the lives of everyone around him either. Donnie Darko isn't perfect, either as horror film or psychological study. But what a refreshingly different, distinctive piece of work it is.