‘Invigorating like a loving hug’: why Donnie Darko is my favorite movie | Jake Gyllenhaal

Mef stereotypical good movie and a comforting cashmere blanket – a film that leaves the audience happy on the sofa when Bridget Jones reaches the end of Mark Darcy – I have to inform a group of experts that I am a tale of teenage differences, rural deception, apocalyptic fear and a man wearing wrong instructions about the death of a child. Again, this is a great song.

Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko explored decades before the Marvel movies and Everything Everywhere at Once created a cultural gem. Its tree-lined streets, Halloween atmosphere and young people roaming the nearby villages were like the strange, tragic plot of Stranger Things long before Hawkins existed. It’s a rural fantasy about fate, madness and the collapse of time, a nocturnal physics puzzle filled with existential dread. But underneath all the cult movie complexity, it’s also a surprisingly uplifting story about a lonely, damaged kid who finally understands his place in the world — and commits to saving it from some of the most iconic ’80s movies ever written.

As an eccentric teenager, Donnie faces all the challenges you’d find in a John Hughes high school movie: the bullies who hide in every school hallway, the well-meaning parents who don’t know who their child is, the constant sense of claustrophobia that permeates everything like rotting under a new coat of paint. He goes through the film on the wheels of a bicycle, as if he is trying to win a common victory. But he’s also suffering from what may be psychotic delusions, recovering from near-death experiences, and experiencing the kind of clinical grief that can make a teenager feel like a warped cell.

Despite all this, Donnie seems to be the only person in his whole community who is ready to fight against the crooked, low-key culture and the smiling deception created by Patrick Swayze’s self-help, self-help paedophilic Jim Cunningham and his kidneys-curdlingly pompous Culture-war warrior Fabulo Kittyus Berry (Fabulous Farmer). His refusal to be a baby and the anti-intellectual nonsense he peddles show him to be the smartest thinker in a town that’s running wild, despite all the odds. Over the course of the film, he manages to time travel and expose the hypocrisy of the adults around him. He also finds a way to accept his death if it means that the people he loves can avoid the (horrific) consequences brought upon them by the ruined universe that leaves the timeline in the film’s opening frames. He’s nothing less than a hero – as his last friend Gretchen Ross points out early on when she says her name sounds like one – albeit one made for misguided, over-thinking and lonely dreamers.

To portray this romantic, unconventional spirit, Kelly spends the 1980s as a velvet-clad shoplifter with a sweet taste and no interest in stocking shelves. If this song had Joy Division’s broken and beautiful Love Will Tear Us Apart and The Church’s spine-tingling, otherworldly Under the Milky Way to send us into a dopamine-fuelled euphoria, this would be one of the greatest songs ever chosen to grace a single film. The fact that such undeniable blasts of pop serotonin as Echo & the Bunnymen’s darkly majestic The Killing Moon and Tears of Fear, the shimmering, shimmering Head Over Heels also seems almost like cheating. But these polished little miracles aren’t just meant to appeal to our taste buds; Kelly uses them as emo ticking time bombs, bringing paid-up, predictable and youthful longing just when the film needs them most.

For those of us who feel a little different growing up, a little (or a lot) different, a tad feral, the results are as reassuring as a warm hug from someone who finds you. The good guy here is a weirdo who moves through the suburbs to dream-pop lightning with a knack for sniffing out sarcasm, sarcasm, and nonsense like a truffle pig. Brylcreemed bad guys are the ones who tell us to shut up, color inside the lines and obey the script. Luckily, we can’t hear them because we’re too busy cranking up the volume and riding our bikes into the evening. Old Halloween hay, under a sodium sky, with no intention of returning before sunrise.