Brick is a hard and fast film-noir set in the context of a contemporary Californian high school. Think The Maltese Falcon meets Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Or perhaps The O.C. But in a good way. This is the kind of film that will lead you to dread or yearn after high school all over again. Granted, no one at my school owned a handgun or dealt cocaine. At least no one I knew of.

On a comparatively diminutive budget, writer-director Rian Johnson has fashioned an accomplished mystery-thriller that is more than just cheap gimmickry or a widescreen rehash of Veronica Mars. Brick works because dares to take its premise seriously; the film entertains with a fiercely independent spirit, and without a hint of pretension.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as the film’s hardboiled detective – and occasional antagonist – doesn’t just carry the film. He owns it. Surely, after this, and his turn in Mysterious Skin, he is an actor on the up-and-up. The remainder of Brick’s ensemble cast also performs admirably. Nora Zehetner, as the femmme fatale, channels Bacall, and even Emilie de Ravin, the slightly annoying and somewhat pointless character on Lost, turns in a memorable performance.

Granted, I couldn’t always understand the dialogue, and not just because of its neo-noir teen jargon, though that did pose its own delightful challenges – ‘bulls’ for example refers to cops, while ‘gum’ means to mess things up. So one might say ‘the bulls always gum things up’. These sorts of lines are delivered at a blistering pace and often in barely audible stoic whispers. But as even as your brain struggles desperately to keep up with the rapid-fire discourse and perpetually twisting plot – the film never stops to catch its own breath – Brick is always entertaining. This is a film that evokes the spirit of Howard Hawk’s The Big Sleep, yet never looses its own unique identity.—Caleb Starrenburg