Paranoid Park

Director Gus Van Sant is the laureate of the troubled-teen cinematic tone poem. Twasn't always the case, as his dreadful Finding Forrester horrifically testifies. But it is perhaps no accident that Forrester was the last studio film by Van Sant, who after years of toggling between Hollywood and Indiewood, jumped into the full-time art racket feet first after the critical and box-office failure of Sean Connery/Rob Brown starrer.

From there, he went on to make the ponderous grower Gerry, with Matt Damon and Casey Affleck enacting a sort of transcontinental Waiting For Godot; the haunting, time-juggling Columbine extrapolation Elephant; and the ponderous but suffused-with-grace-notes Kurt Cobain extrapolation Last Days. I'm not sure if his latest, Paranoid Park, based on a novel by Blake Nelson, is the best of this run, but it's terribly strong — in structural ingenuity, emotional pull, and particularly visual beauty. Working for the first time with legendary Hong Kong-based cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Van Sant makes the gray-blue skies of his hometown Portland, Oregon, look positively enchanted, even during the story's most fraught moments.

Baby-faced Alex (Nevins) is a quiet kid who doesn't seem committed to much of anything — his school (it's barely there to him, and vice versa), his sexuality (he has an almost hilariously perfunctory relationship with his putative girlfriend), whatever. He's a skateboarder, but so are all his friends, so that's no big deal either. Still, he's heard that the boarding action at a place called Paranoid Park is pretty hardcore, or sick, or what have you, so he pays a visit to that ominous-sounding spot (which is where one of the film's most virtuoso sequences, a skateboarding montage that transcends all the clichés you might associate with skateboarding montages, takes place). It's on a sojourn there that he takes an ill-advised jaunt on a freight train, a stunt that results in the grisly death of a night watchman at the train yard. In the wake of questioning from a very sympathetic-seeming cop (Liu), and prodding from a platonic female friend (McKinney), Alex feels the inchoate stirrings of something like a conscience, or maybe just plain consciousness.

The above précis is the straightforward version of the film's story, which is not at all how it's served up. Van Sant here juggles time with an assuredness that brings to mind Resnais and sometimes even Hitchcock, and it isn't all for show. Seeing Alex at different stages of his moral development within a five-minute span is more beguiling, and moving, than experiencing his progress in a linear fashion. Even more captivating is the way Van Sant will stop the action dead to throw in, say, a slow-motion closeup (from Alex's POV) of a peripheral character, scored to a furious hardcore song. (Elsewhere Van Sant uses some Nino Rota music, which contributes to the air of enchantment I mentioned above.) These aren't gratuitous arty touches but intense stabs at conveying the perceptions of a separate consciousness. Van Sant is currently at work on a larger-scale project, a fictionalized biography of the late Harvey Milk. I wonder if — or rather, I hope that — he can bring his ever-refining cinema poetic to a more conventional structure.