Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park isn’t so much of a film as it is a disjointed and misguided poem to wasted youth. A narrative hat is more of a series of longing gazes at young boys floating on their skateboards and shifting their dopey eyes to the Heavens as they wonder of their cruelties and confusion of their life. The fact that a murder plot finds itself in between Park’s whimsically-edited montages and tragically-ironic musical selections seems more like a burden than something that motivates the characters. While filmmakers should be commended for using non-traditional techniques and styles, Van Sant comes off more as an ADD-riddled hipster who wants the audience to adopt his crush on his subject characters.

Alex (newcomer Gabe Nevins) is a skateboarder floating through his life as a high school student in a drab and rainy Portland, Oregon. Somehow this grungy sad sack has a cheerleader girlfriend named Jessica (Taylor Momsen) but he would rather spend his time at skateboard parks and hanging out with other big-eyed, mop-heads. When Jessica asks him why he wants to hang out with his buddies instead of her, we know this is Van Sant’s way of signaling that Alex may be confused with his orientation. The very openly-gay Van Sant has visited so many different variations of the could-be-gay-or-not high school loner that they almost serve as interchangeable vessels in each of his stories.

Anyway, Alex is confronted with a murder investigation that he may have been involved with. Detective Lu (Daniel Liu) is questioning local skateboarders who may have led to the demise of a railroad security guard. In fact, the scene where the guard’s torso is crawling along the tracks is perhaps one of the most shocking moments in recent memory. Not so shocking for the horror and violence of the moment, but simply for so out-of-place it is with the rest of the film. With any other character, this would be a cathartic moment. And he does panic. But the film seems to find it more of a distraction from showing more skateboarding footage. After all but ignoring this, the rest of the audience might wonder why they brought in the murder plot to begin with.

When Van Sant is doing his best as a filmmaker (like he does in the unforgettable To Die For and Good Will Hunting), he coyly uses their attractive features to pierce their dark perspective and inner yearnings. Whether it be Matt Damon’s Will Hunting rejection of his own intellect or Nicole Kidman’s Suzanne Stone and her willingness to kill anyone who gets in the way of celebrity, Van Sant made these characters compelling in their own obsessive self-destruction. Often, as is the case with Paranoid Park, Van Sant gets bogged down with being fixated with the character that he barely bothers to explain the why’s and how’s of why they are who they are.

Rather than look at character development, he plays around with film stock and tries to speed up and slow down the frames in different scenes. When some directors do this, there is an obvious connection context to the cinematic style, but Van Sant is so intentionally distanced from this these characters that they just feel like film school experiments. He is not so much interested in capturing the story but exploiting his titillation. Abercrombie and Fitch catalogues offer more purpose.

If the visual look and plot of Paranoid Park is problematic, Van Sant’s attempt at teenaged prose is far worse. The sheer fact that it sounds exactly like the voice of a disaffected 15-year-old is not necessarily a compliment. It is pretentious and stilted; it offers nothing as far as insight. I am certain any disaffected 15-year-old, as the ones who were in the theater with me during the screening, will find this to be a vindicating film. The rest of us might wonder why Van Sant bothered at all.

The film is playing at the Moxie until Tuesday night and is rated R for some disturbing images, language and sexual content.

.5 My Own Private Idaho + .5 Gleaning the Cube = 1 for Paranoid Park