‘As reassuring as a warm hug’: why Donnie Darko is my feelgood movie

2 hours ago 10

If the stereotypical feelgood movie is a cashmere comfort blanket – the kind of film that leaves viewers blissed out on the sofa as the credits roll and Bridget Jones finally gets to snog Mark Darcy – I should probably notify a qualified team of specialists that my own is a tale of teenage alienation, suburban hypocrisy, apocalyptic dread and a man in a monstrous rabbit suit issuing stern instructions about death. Then again, it does have a considerably better soundtrack.

Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko explored alternate realities decades before the Marvel films and Everything Everywhere All at Once made the multiverse a pop-cultural touchstone. Its tree-lined streets, Halloween skies and teenagers pedalling through suburbia were like a weirder, sadder blueprint for Stranger Things long before Hawkins existed. It’s a suburban fever dream about fate, madness and collapsing timelines, a nightmarish physics puzzle steeped in existential dread. But beneath all the cult-film weirdness, it is also the oddly uplifting story of a lonely, damaged kid who finally understands his place in the world – and sacrifices himself to save it against the backdrop of some of the most luminous 80s alt-pop atmospherics ever recorded.

As a geeky teenage outsider, Donnie contends with all the usual problems you might find in a typical John Hughes high school movie: jockish bullies lurking in every school corridor, well-meaning parents who have no idea who their son is, an abiding sense of suburban claustrophobia that permeates everything like rot beneath fresh paint. He glides through the film on bicycle wheels, as if trying to outrun the ordinary. But he is also suffering from what may be psychotic delusions, recovering from the shock of a near-death experience, and carrying the sort of chemical sadness that can make adolescence feel like a padded cell.

Despite all this, Donnie emerges as the only person in his entire community who is willing to take on the forces of warped, narrow-minded conservatism and smiling hypocrisy embodied by Patrick Swayze’s nefarious, paedophilic self-help guru Jim Cunningham and his kidney-curdlingly pompous culture-war foot soldier Kitty Farmer (the fabulous Beth Grant). His refusal to be infantilised by the anti-intellectual cult nonsense they peddle marks him out as the clearest thinker in a town running on autopilot, despite all his issues. Over the course of the movie, he works out time travel and exposes the adult frauds around him. He even finds a way to accept his own death if it means the people he loves can avoid the (mostly awful) fates introduced to them by the doomed tangent universe that hives off from the main timeline in the film’s opening frames. He is nothing less than a superhero – as his eventual girlfriend Gretchen Ross points out early on when she says his name sounds like one – albeit one built for an audience of misfits, overthinkers and lonely dreamers.

To illustrate this spirit of romantic, elegant nonconformity, Kelly raids the 1980s like a velvet-gloved record-store shoplifter with exquisite taste and no interest in the filler bins. If the soundtrack only had Joy Division’s bruised and brilliant Love Will Tear Us Apart and the Church’s spine-tingling, otherworldly Under the Milky Way to wow us into dopamine-fuelled euphoria, this would still be one of the greatest selections of movie music ever to grace a single film. The fact that such irresistible bursts of pop serotonin as Echo & the Bunnymen’s darkly majestic The Killing Moon and Tears for Fears’ sparkling, heart-lurching Head Over Heels also show up almost feels like cheating. But these polished little miracles are not just there to flatter our taste; Kelly deploys them like time-triggered emo-bombs, delivering payloads of nostalgia, foreboding and teenage yearning exactly when the film needs them most.

To those of us who felt a bit different growing up, a little (or a lot) more neurodiverse, a tad feral, the effect is as reassuring as a warm hug from someone who gets you. The good guy here is a freak moving through suburbia to bolts of dream-pop lightning with the ability to sniff out sanctimonious, censorious, reactionary bullshit like a truffle pig. The Brylcreemed bad guys are the ones telling us to sit still, colour inside the lines and obey the script. Fortunately, we can’t hear them because we’re too busy turning the volume up and cycling into the dusk. Past Halloween lawns, under sodium skies, with no intention of coming back before sunrise.