That quality was enhanced by the bitty slow burn of its release. The film, with its blend of ordinary high-school angst and trippy, whoa-what-was-THAT philosophy was pretty much designed to be shared among teenagers like a secret – a work that both understands their view of the world and offers to expand it in cosmic, confusing ways. I first saw it when I was 19 or so, which was pretty much ideal. But it has an eerie, enduring power: would that many comic-book heroes’ stories were so noble and haunting and finite.Ī 20th anniversary is an odd one for Donnie Darko to celebrate: if any film should be granted eternal teenagedom, Kelly’s vastly ambitious debut feature is it. As superhero origin stories go, it doesn’t have much franchise potential: Donnie’s legend begins and ends in one fell swoop. For plucky Peter Parker, that means standard-issue feats of derring-do and defeating evil for downcast Donnie Darko, it means ending and altering the very timeline in which he exists, ultimately dying so that others may live. Kelly’s sci-fi-tinted tale of adolescent isolation came out six months before Spider-Man, the film that kick-started the now all-consuming superhero movie revival, and the two have more in common than you might initially assume: both are stories of an awkward teenage boy coming to terms with what appear to be otherworldly abilities, and assuming responsibility for the world around them.

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