Brick: A-

“I don't know, but whether she scraped or copped or just ran her tab around the world and into her own back, it must have been grand.”

A teenage loner (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) receives a frantic call from his ex-girlfriend (Emile de Raven): she’s in some sort of trouble—she’s fallen in with the wrong crowd—things are falling on her head, fast, and hard.He begins to sort out the fall-out. Characters are encountered: vixens, vamps, tramps, dopers, druggies, dealers, and pinheads—and each has their niche, their hook, their own particular brand of delirious one-liner. (“You looking to get back into things? I could use you,” purrs one particular Drama Queen—and the chick ain’t kidding: she holds court behind the theatre in a massive dressing room, and her offers come like daggers wrapped in velvet.) Up, up, up the social ladder the kid climbs, until he ends with a bloodbath.

People die.Weary, our hero stands in the mist, waiting for the final clinching moment—the dénouement—that will seal the fates of everyone involved, all the way back to the poor dead girl in the storm drain. And out of the mist, come to answer for it all, and put it all to bed, who could it be but…?

The trick is in the telling and I won’t reveal the final catch of Brick. Three years ago, when I saw the debut of Rian Johnson’s debut film, I was as mesmerized as I was perplexed. Its intricacies confused me as much as the dialogue and style left me overjoyed. And yet now, when revisiting the movie, the haze of its structure and homage to Dashiell Hammett clears, and all becomes clear: just as one-of-several femme fatales sings, “Ah, but pray make no mistake/We’re very wide awake,” the admonishment could seem almost to reach through the screen, as if to say, “He knew it all along—which is part of the fun, the mystery, as much as it is a tragedy.”