A dead blonde, the amateur shamus who loved her and the problems inherent in investigating a crime when you're still in high school and have to ask Mom to borrow the car. In Veronica Mars, the detective was the eponymous perky teen turned premature cynic by the corruption her investigations unearthed, while Mars' creator, Rob Thomas, used noir form as a means of addressing class warfare, racial friction and privilege gone lousy. First time writer-director Rian Johnson's Brick goes where Mars went before, subtracts any subtext or recognizable human behavior and offers instead a game cast speaking entirely in 40s-style lingo. Why? One assumes it seemed like a cool idea at the time.
Again, unlike Mars—which updates its noir-style chatter to contemporary vernacular and which we promise to stop referencing, already—Brick lives and most often goes belly-up from its need to fabricate ever-more frantic retrogressive usages, while assuming that a rote replay of the existential crime genre's greatest hits in teen drag will somehow keep our attention away from thoughts about ever more dear ticket prices.
Anyway: Brick's expired blonde is Emily, played by Emilie de Ravin, whose character on Lost also suffered a premature, flashback-laden demise. Secretly in love with Emily is amateur gumshoe Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who has some nebulous deal with his high school's vice president (Richard Roundtree) to do detectivey things. With the aid of a bespectacled pal called The Brain (Matt O'Leary), Brendon endeavors to penetrate the web o' intrigue surrounding Emily's death.
As if cobbled together from a set of index cards listing Johnson's favorite noir-style twitches, Brendon's quest is less a story than an assemblage of genre elements. Like every '40s private dick, Brendon is constantly, viciously knocked around by assorted Bugsy Malone-goes-to-high-school thugs while immediately displaying recuperative powers worthy of Jason Vorhees.
Brendon then forms a questionable alliance with the local crime kingpin—over-cutely truncated here to The Pin (Lukas Hass)—while trying to beat off the advances of the local morally impaired fatale (Nora Zehetner), who shows up resplendent in blood-red silk sheath and matching Bakelite hair adornment. As time goes by, Johnson compulsively complicates Brandon's quest in what one assumes the director hopes will evoke the vertiginous impenetrability of The Maltese Falcon, but which ends up simply being impossible to follow.
Meanwhile, the only real test faced by the cast is their ability to mouth lines such as "the ape blows or I clam" and "I'm not heeling you to hook you" without sounding entirely like kids auditioning for a summer stock version of Murder, My Sweet. Of the actors assembled, Gordon-Levitt fares best at getting his tongue around Johnson's dated smartass-isms while also aping the deadpan somnambulist mode favored by the genre's original practioners. But unlike his similar suburb work as an emotionally cauterized youth in Mysterious Skin—a great film about important human stuff—Gordon-Levitt's main job here is as point man to prove that his director is as hip to classic noirs as Tarantino is to obscure Hong Kong action films.
You can't fault Johnson for a lack of honest genre love, but his forced formalism—performed with not a small amount of technical adroitness—achieves little other than to keep us at a drama-neutering distance. Not only does his film feel inert and secondhand, it feels as if its creator views inertia and second-handedness as virtues. Depressingly, numbingly and like so many other indie films of late, it's a movie that thinks the only thing worth making movies about are other movies.