Brick is noir posturing in high school. Told with pop and fizz in a hip spoken vernacular of insulated youth—think of Anthony Burgess’ “nadsat” lingo for his thugs in A Clockwork Orange, here without the Slavic roots—it initially seems like it is the kids who are posturing, not the movie. Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is all concentrated irritation and barely suppressed violent rage after his ex-girlfriend gives him a mysterious, coded telephone call and two days later turns up dead. Though scruffy bangs and glasses, not to mention a habit of perpetually jamming his fists in his sweatshirt pockets and hunching his shoulders in introverted resilience, code Brendan as a nerd, the fist-heavy and shamus-clever aggression with which he enlists high school friends and foe alike in order to untangle a complex plot of Raymond Chandler proportions tells us he is prototypically the psychologically traumatized noir hero of yesteryear. And that’s just the problem. If writer/direction Rian Johnson was either (a) exploring high school tensions and rivalries through an allegorical and stylistic use of outrageous noir characters, language, immorality and plot contortions, or (b) showing how high school students thoroughly submerge themselves in a pretense (hard-boiled, for instance) to navigate and survive the turmoil and identity formation of those formative years, the concept of Brick would have been truly inspired. Instead, the film is a snazzy but hollow shift in the generational register, a typical detective story told by and featuring characters about fifteen years younger than normal. Cleverness abounds: the charmingly lo-fi but hard-hitting fight sequences, the abstract anonymity of the empty high school campus and suburban streets, and just about everything involving Johnson’s staging of scenes with (school) drug boss The Pin (a hilariously faux-sinister Lukas Haas), who rides around in a van with a moody table lamp in it, and at one point takes a beaten and captured Brendan up from his basement lair to his household kitchen, where his mother serves him cider and cornflakes. Sadly though, nothing more is at stake in the movie other than the upstaging of its own cleverness, even though Brendan is motivated by the death of his high school sweetheart. And this isn’t Scream (Craven, 1996), where the movie’s characters were, in an astutely post-modern way, pop-culturally aware of the tropes of the stories and conventions of their lives' genre (there horror, here noir). But no one knows about the noir facade, and in fact it seems like no one knows they are in high school either, because aside from a few cute references to cliques as if they were rival gangs, Johnson uses the place as a phyical and age setting and not as a basis for a social milieu. The characters in Brick talk the talk because it is the only talk to talk, not because they think it is cool to talk like that or because they need to talk like that. There is no moral or emotional weight or importance to the labyrinthine plot or patter-talk, it is all just sly, crackling dialog and nicknames. The deaths and the pain and the kids do not really matter, in the beginning or in the end, and Brick ends up weightless.