IFC Films
Gabe Nevins as Alex in "Paranoid Park," directed by Gus Van Sant.
"I just feel like there has to be something else out there," says Alex (Gabe Nevins), the teenage protagonist of Gus Van Sant's new film "Paranoid Park," to Macy (Lauren McKinney), the bright, nerdy, faintly-punk girl who isn't his girlfriend but probably should be. What Alex means isn't clear to us or to him -- something beyond his daily life of high school, divorced parents and skateboarding, surely, and maybe something beyond the perceivable world -- but his predicament is the same one faced by American independent film in its quest to capture reality, whatever that is.
"Paranoid Park," which was highly praised at both the Cannes and New York film festivals and now gets a limited release from IFC, is much more concerned with the in-here than the out-there. It's a haunting, absorbing aural and visual construction whose landscapes are interior, meditative and psychological. Although Van Sant adapted "Paranoid Park" from Blake Nelson's young-adult novel of the same name (which in turn was clearly inspired by Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment"), plot and character are minor ingredients in the brew, at best.