Film - A life-or-death struggle lurks behind glittering teen clichés, writes Victoria Segal Brick (15)

Blond surfer dudes smoking pot, jocks flushing nerds' heads down toilets, girls with a reputation worse than Mae West's and square chicks who turn out to be a hit with all the boys once they take off their specs and let their hair down: the high-school movie operates within certain well-observed structures, and if you want to stick some kind of dance contest in there, too, so much the better. However, Brick, the director Rian Johnson's debut, makes no such concessions to the bobby-soxers. In-stead of a playground, his version of full-time education is a hell-hole where getting a date to the prom comes a poor second to avoiding a date with death.

If David Lynch or the Coen brothers decided to remake Michael Lehmann's Heathers (1989), it would probably come out something like Brick, as Johnson's script hums with constant menace and sparks with hipster slang. While teen-centred films not in thrall to the sunny Grease blueprint often try to generate a lament for lost youth - the tedious guns-and-drugs hand-wringing of the recent British film Kidulthood comes to mind - Johnson has created a highly stylised and sinister world. Blond hair floats in a drainage canal, red numbers flash on an alarm clock, a cigarette stub rolls down the tarmac after being thrown from a car. Everything is weighted with portent. The trappings of high-school cliché might be present in the rows of lockers and playing fields, but teachers, parents, education are all oddly absent.

This dreamlike dislocation is achieved by two things: Johnson's dense, slang-heavy script, and by cannily setting the film in the director's home town of San Clemente, California. The affectless landscape of small-town America is exploited beautifully, its parking lots and anonymous roadside complexes evoking a world where the heart of the commun- ity has been eaten away by mega-marts and malls. No wonder these kids can run wild - there's nobody around to see them. In an early scene, the hero Brendan Fry (Joseph Gordon-Levitt of Third Rock From the Sun) has a rendezvous at a phone box on a deserted highway; in another, he is chased around a car park by a black car, like an episode from Duel. No wonder the kids use a system of cryptic codes and symbols to represent clandestine meeting places; there's nothing really here.

The complex plot is equally mysterious. In searching for his missing former girlfriend Emily (Emilie de Ravin), Gordon-Levitt's hunched, intense Brendan dis-covers that she's out of her depth and finds himself drawn into the world of The Pin (Lukas Haas), a twentysomething drug dealer who controls the town's "junk" supply while wearing a cape, a cane and an orthopaedic shoe. When Emily's fate is revealed, even more teen zombies crawl out of the woodwork - the desperate loser Dode (Noah Segan) and The Pin's supersensitive muscle Tugger (Noah Fleiss) - making Brendan's mission all the more dangerous.

There is no doubt that this is Johnson's attempt to locate a hard-boiled thriller straight out of the pages of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler in an entirely incongruous setting. There's a sly reference to a "Pinkertons Deli" and the archetypes are all in place. Brendan is the private eye who - no matter how he might look (actually, as if he's about to perform an acoustic set at an indie club) - is perfectly capable of bloodying the other guy's nose. Rather splendidly, he always takes his glasses off and puts them in his pocket before a fight. Then there's Laura (Nora Zehetner), the femme fatale racking up her early kills - "If you were behind me, I'd have to tie one eye up watching both your hands," he tells her - and the showgirl Kara (Meagan Good), always hanging about the drama department in a dia phanous costume. The language, too, is amazing, more The Malt-ese Falcon than 50 Cent. "Yegs" are guys, "bulls" are police, and Brendan has a snappier way with a retort than a .45. "I've got all five senses and I slept last night - that puts me six up on you," he says to a gang of doped-up thugs.

Brick is quotable, clever and cryptic; the only obvious thing about the film is its imminent cult status. Yet it isn't, as some doubters have implied, this decade's Bugsy Malone - though the clash between high school and underworld leads to some dark comedy. In true Freakonomics style, The Pin's mother floats about the kitchen as her son cuts his deals, making breakfast and pouring juice for his friends, while the film's only other adult, the school vice-president (Richard Roundtree, aka Shaft), is using Brendan as an informant. Yet while the juxtaposition is funny, it is also supremely unsettling, leaving you wondering where the moral centre is, where the authority lies.

At best, school is a world governed by its own internal logic, a universe of hormones and crises played out away from adult eyes. Brick, however, implies that there is more going on behind the bike sheds than a bit of smoking and groping: an intense life-or-death drama that is, quite literally, too cool for school.

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