01:00 AM EDT on Saturday, July 8, 2006

BY STEPHEN HOLDEN
The New York Times

A contemporary high school drama in which every other word isn't "dude" or "awesome:" What kind of movie is that?

Brick, a flashy cinematic stunt perpetrated by Rian Johnson, dispenses with the adolescent gibberish of the here and now to graft the hard-boiled argot of Dashiell Hammett onto an upscale Southern California high school: Beverly Hills 90210 and The O.C. go noir.

In a twisty plot that proudly borrows elements from The Maltese Falcon, Red Harvest and other Hammett yarns, Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a teenage Bogart-as-Sam Spade minus the trench coat and fedora, digs into a roiling adolescent underworld of murder and drug dealing.

It's all so seamy, sordid, lurid and shocking! And dull, despite a noirish gloss of wide-angle cinematography and a jaundiced, smoggy color scheme.

If nothing else, the concept of a high school film noir is a shrewd attention-getting move for a first-time filmmaker like Johnson.

Brick was duly awarded the Sundance Film Festival's Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision in 2005. Its raw ambition certainly puts it near the head of its class in contemporary teenage dramas. But what does that mean in a genre dominated by C students and worse?

The word "class" is a misnomer, since there's not a classroom in sight in Brick. The main action takes place outside in the high school parking lot.

Brick is even less dramatically convincing than Alan Parker's 1976 gangster spoof, Bugsy Malone, which cast children as hoods and featured the 13-year-old Jodie Foster vamping it up like Rita Hayworth in Gilda. (Brick has nothing half as spicy.) Even a guilty pleasure like Cruel Intentions, which took Dangerous Liaisons to high school, landed some uncomfortable emotional punches because it was acted rather than pantomimed.

The underachieving cast of Brick merely goes through the motions.

The women are especially pallid. Isn't a deep whiskey-and-cigarette-ravaged voice a prerequisite for playing a noir siren? Or has the Hilary-Britney-Mary-Kate-and-Ashley chirp stamped out precociously womanly voices like the 19-year-old Lauren Bacall's in To Have and Have Not?

Maybe Brick is a comedy. There is something cute, if not outright ludicrous, in the spectacle of dewy young actors striking the poses of hard-boiled demimondaines and desperadoes and failing utterly to make them come alive.

The movie seems to have its tongue stuck in its cheek during a final showdown in a suburban basement, while the impervious mother of a teenage drug lord is upstairs baking cookies. But funny it's not.

The story, briefly: Brendan, a lean, squinty-eyed loner, senses that there is something rotten in his high school when his insecure, social-climbing ex-girlfriend, Emily (Emilie de Ravin), vanishes after phoning him in a state of panic.

Brendan, who still cares for Emily, becomes obsessed with finding her and enlists his uber-nerd pal, the Brain (Matt O'Leary), as a fellow gumshoe.

Brendan has an ambiguous relationship with the high school's stern assistant vice principal (Richard Roundtree), the movie's surrogate police chief, with whom he verbally spars in some of the film's most embarrassingly wooden conversations.

He soon discovers Emily's dead body at the entrance to a tunnel. As he meticulously retraces her steps, we meet high school versions of the usual noir suspects: a predatory drama queen (Meagan Good), a stoner who requires some roughing up (Noah Segan), a slinky femme fatale (Nora Zehetner), a beefy thug (Noah Fleiss) and, finally, the drug lord himself, the Pin (Lukas Haas).

Haas, who twirls a falcon-crested cane and walks with an elegant limp, suggests a wiry, smirking Sydney Greenstreet.

Haas and Gordon-Levitt at least succeed in evoking the outlines of their characters. But the film's ham-handed reliance on period argot not only wears thin; it keeps the characters, such as they are, at a chilly distance.

*

Brick

Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Nora Zehetner, Lukas Haas, Noah Fleiss, Matt O'Leary, Emilie de Ravin, Noah Segan, Richard Roundtree, Meagan Good, Brian White.

Rated: R, contains violence, profanity.