Brick is a high school movie with no interest in remembering high school stuff. It remembers how high school felt, and it is the only film I can name that gets my inner experience of high school exactly right. We’re not talking about my adolescence here, of course… we’re talking about the cinematic adolescence I narrated to myself while I was still trapped in it, where a breakup was a death, a rumor was a federal case, and the field between the dining hall and Froelicher Student Center had borders you crossed at your own risk. I love this movie the way I love dreaming.
Rian Johnson takes Dashiell Hammett and turns him loose in a San Clemente parking lot. Nobody blinks. The kids speak a dense, clipped tough-guy slang, half of it real 1930s crime-fiction slang, and they never treat it as garb. Teenagers don’t treat anything as a costume. There was a time in high school that I wore a trench coat. So what? That deadpan conviction is the whole reason the film never tips into parody. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Brendan as a private eye who is really just a heartbroken seventeen-year-old, a boy who has decided that solving a murder is the only acceptable way to come apart. He kneels in the dirt. He takes his beatings and files them away. He runs on the single quality every Hammett gumshoe runs on, the refusal to stop walking toward the thing that is hurting him.
Lukas Haas is The Pin, a high school drug lord who runs his operation out of his mother’s basement while she serves the boys apple juice and asks if they want anything else. That one scene is the entire movie and the entire director. Johnson would spend the next twenty years planting menace in the middle of domestic comfort, the Thrombey breakfast in Knives Out, the small-town kitchens of Poker Face, and it begins here, with a kingpin with a a curfew.
People called Brick a stunt. All surface, more wardrobe than feeling. They saw the trench coats and the invented vocabulary and decided the facade was the whole building, and Johnson knew they would. That’s the gag. Take a sixteen-year-old’s inner life, refuse to look down on it, hold every disaster at the exact size the kid is living it, and you arrive somewhere more grounded than the warm, rueful teen movies that congratulate you for outgrowing all that. The certainty that your one small private grief is the most important event on earth is the real weather of being young. Brick believes in all of it without a trace of doubt.
Half a million dollars, shot on weekends at the Johnson’s own high school, and it still plays like a fever I ran at seventeen and never fully sweated out. I could watch it on a loop.