Paranoid Park: Starring Gabe Nevins, Jake Miller and Taylor Momsen. Directed by Gus Van Sant. (R. 78 minutes. At the Bridge, Shattuck, Camera and Smith Rafael. For complete movie listings and show times, and to buy tickets for select theaters, go to sfgate.com/movies.)

Gus Van Sant’s "Paranoid Park" is appropriately structured like a ride on skateboard: It swoops back and forth in time, hovers in midair, twists back on itself over and over again, then rolls into silence.

Based on a novel by Blake Nelson, the film focuses on a young skateboarder who, like many teenagers, has no particular direction in life. When Alex (Gabe Nevins) is called to his high school’s main office to meet with a homicide cop, a poster on the door he walks through advertises a forthcoming career fair at the school. You know there’s little chance he’ll be attending.

The cop asks him about a particular night when Gabe and his older friend Jared (Jake Miller) had talked about going to Paranoid Park, an illegal, skater-built park under the freeway. They had checked the place out earlier that week, but Alex said he didn’t think he was ready for Paranoid Park. "No one’s ever ready for Paranoid Park," Jared answered.

But on the night in question, Jared decides to head off to Oregon State University in search of female companionship, leaving Alex to hit Paranoid Park on his own. He meets up with some older kids, and something happens. While Van Sant’s script is swirling through time, we find out that a railroad security guard has been killed - cut in half by a passing train, except the autopsy reveals he was hit on the head first. A skateboard with DNA evidence on it has been fished out of the river.

The detective tries to low-key the conversation with Alex. He references his own youth, says he knows how it is, being young. For his part, Alex recalls stopping at Subway that night and ordering a 6-inch sandwich. He recites the ingredients.

Alex is writing it all down. He says at the beginning of the film that the events won’t be in order, but in the end, it will make sense. Eventually, we learn that he’s writing it down because his friend Macy (Lauren McKinney) told him it was a good way of dealing with things that bother you. When she looks at him across a cafe table, she guesses that something’s happened. Nothing’s happened, he says at first. A few seconds later, he changes his mind. Write it down, she tells him. After he’s written it down, he can send it to someone, or give it to her, or burn it. It doesn’t matter.

"Paranoid Park" is a film about guilt, about paranoia, about how something happens that may not have been intended, but it happened and you have to live with it. But, as Hitchcock and other masters of psychological thrillers knew well, guilt never rests easy in the heart or mind. As Alex, in typical teenage fashion, semi-sleepwalks through his day, through the locker-lined corridors of his school, through the mall and the streets of Portland, his face is expressionless. His voice is similarly flat as he narrates what he’s committing to his notebook. But, as Macy knew, something had happened to him.

As the sequence of events becomes clear, the audience increasingly feels every knot in the kid’s stomach, and that’s because Van Sant’s direction isn’t merely appropriate to the story - it becomes the story itself and pulls the audience along for the ride. Grainy scenes shot in handheld Super 8 snake in and out of other footage in 35mm. The lighting cascades from overexposed whiteout to shadowy darkness. Alex walks at a normal pace down the long school corridor on his way to be interrogated, but then the film decelerates to slow motion. At Paranoid Park, boarders launch themselves into the air and the film speed slows again: They hover for a second or two - we think, will they land on their boards, or slam their bodies into the sculpted concrete? - and then they descend.

In the hands of many other directors, all of this would be mere gimmickry. That’s far from the case here. The stylization not only mirrors what’s going on in Alex’s mind, but it also provides necessary context and perspective for the audience. Van Sant’s vision is beautifully realized by the brilliantly freewheeling cinematography of Christopher Doyle and a fine cast of mostly unknown actors, many of whom were recruited through a MySpace page. The result is that most of the kids, and especially Nevins, seem worlds more real than kids in most commercial films. Even Taylor Momsen, who stars in "Gossip Girl," avoids making us think she’s just another Hollywood hothouse plant.

"Paranoid Park" isn’t a big film, but it is exceedingly well made and provocative. For some of the way, it seems like a kind of skateboard whodunit. Soon enough, we understand it’s much more than that. And by then, we know we’re in for a ride to remember.

Taylor Momsen

On her new movie, ..:NAMESPACE PREFIX = ST1 />Paranoid Park, and the next season of Gossip Girl

by Holly Siegel

The lovely Taylor Momsen (that's Jenny Humphrey to you) spoke to me after school, at a diner frequented by her friends at Professional Performing Arts School, the New York City high school that has seen Claire Danes, Britney Spears and Alicia Keys walk through it's halls. PPAS is about three miles from the type of schools that Gossip Girl's Constance Billiard is based on, and even further from Oregon's Burnside Skate Park, where her new movie, Paranoid Park (directed by Gus Van Sant), was filmed. In the movie, Momsen plays Jennifer, the girlfriend of the main character, Alex, played by Gabe Nevins, who is amazing in his first role. Here, Momsen tells us about filming the movie, high school in New York, the next season of Gossip Girl, what fragrance she's wearing and more.

ELLEgirl: Tell us about Paranoid Park.

Taylor Momsen: Well, the script it was sent to me through my management, and I loved it. It was funny though, because originally I thought, "this is the beginning of the script" - it was 33 pages – "when are they releasing the end?" I was like, "how is this the film?" I made a tape and sent it to Gus [Van Sant]. The cool thing about working with Gus was it was a lot of improve. You became your character very fully. Because it was only 33 pages, there were days that you didn't know what you were doing and you just showed up. I took two weeks of intensive bareback horseback riding and filmed a scene where I was riding and then it never made into the film. It was so great as an actress - I really had to fully become my character. He would sit you down before a scene and say, "this is what happened, this is what's going to happen." He'd say "go, be her." That was so different than Gossip Girl, where it's so scripted.

ELLEgirl: Where did you film?

Taylor Momsen: Portland, Oregon. It was cold and rainy. It's actually a park in Portland, or at least in Oregon. It's called Burnside Skate Park, and it's true that the skaters made it themselves (illegally). I wanted to see it because all the scenes take place at that park. I was driving around with the guys in the film and I was like "take me by the park I haven't seen it yet!" and I go to get out and they're like, "NOOO! Stay in the car! You can't get out! It's too sketchy!" That's what made part of the film so authentic - it wasn't a set it's just how it is.

ELLEgirl: Did you learn how to skateboard while on set?

Taylor Momsen: Um, a little bit but… I kind of dropped it when I moved to New York. I still have my board. The guys taught me a little bit. Can't do any tricks or anything though. I can balance. I can stay on.

ELLEgirl: How is your character different than Jenny Humphrey?

Taylor Momsen: Well, they have the same name. Jennifer in Paranoid Park because she represents everything fake, everything superficial. She's self-obsessed, popular, queen bee, head cheerleader, b-tch. She's so worried about what people are saying about her. Everyone knows one of those girls. Jenny is the opposite, she's not the popular one she's a little bit different - striving to be that girl. She's not a clone of everyone, she's sweet and nice and really smart. They both think about what they are doing to gain popularity in their school. Jenny thinks about what she wears and says when she's around those girls on the Upper East Side and Jennifer – she was dating Alex, the skateboarder, because it makes her edgy. She's not going to date the football player, she's going to date the hot skateboarder because it makes her cool.

ELLEgirl: How are both of them different from you?

Taylor Momsen: I don't really think I'm very superficial, so I'm not so much like Jennifer in Paranoid Park, but I can relate to Jenny – she's very creative and she's smart and she knows what she's doing. I think the cool thing is she has two sides to her, she has her Upper East Side role that she can fit into and her downtown life too. I have my uptown older group of friends and some of my downtown younger group of friends

Paranod Park opens in New York tomorrow, March 7th, at the Angelika Film Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas!!! The film will be rolling out to more cities in the upcoming weeks and new dates are added each week, so keep checking the page!

Check out the early buzz from the film (more reviews are posted in the blog section):

Manohla Dargis of the New York Times proclaims: "Dazzling...Haunting, voluptuously beautiful...A modestly scaled triumph without a false or wasted moment."

The Associated Press declares: "You'll find it's hypnotic, mesmerizing, gorgeous. "Paranoid Park" is at once a murder mystery, a study of adolescent angst and a work of art."

The film will also be available On Demand through IFC in Theatres On Demand.

Thank you all for your support and hope you can all make it out to the theatre!!

Keep spreading the word!

The pleasing circularity of Gus Van Sant's masterful Paranoid Park is not only a function of the film's narrative structure but reflects the arc of its maker's career. Few directors have revisited their earliest concerns with such vigor.

Van Sant's debut, the 1985 Mala Noche, was a moody drizzle of images evoking the Portland skid-row convenience-store manager's hopeless infatuation with a Mexican street kid. That $25,000 cheap-ster was followed by wary engagement with the mainstream in the form of star vehicles, feel-good Oscar fodder, and literary adaptations, as well as a perverse shot-by-shot remake of Psycho. Ultimately and unexpectedly, Van Sant returned to the Pacific Northwest and minimalist low-budget filmmaking; the lyrical yet gritty Paranoid Park cashes the check that Mala Noche wrote.

Paranoid Park is adapted, with reasonable fidelity, from Blake Nelson's young-adult novel. But in telling the tale of a Portland skater kid involved in the accidental death of a railroad bull, Van Sant comes close to inventing his own film language. The chronology is shuffled and the narrative dealt out as a succession of subjective impressions. Paranoid Park is both loose and structured, fluidly shot in 35mm, Super-8, and videotape by Chris Doyle and suavely jagged in its editing. There are passages that approach pure cinema, though never abstraction, grounded as the action is in Leslie Shatz's layered sound design, an audio mosaic that effortlessly integrates Nino Rota, Beethoven, obscure whispering, and a 1974 pop ballad with a trippy organ riff.

High school is a terrain of infinite interest to Van Sant, and, in a sense, Paranoid Park is a companion piece to his Columbine-inspired Elephant. The institutional corridors are automatically haunted. In its sensuous appreciation of a particular subculture, however, Paranoid Park also echoes aspects of Kenneth Anger's underground mix of Brooklyn bikers and Brill Building anthems, Scorpio Rising. Van Sant's skateboarders are shot as though participating in the Olympics: Beautiful young boys twist and hurtle through space in fetishizing slow motion, defying gravity before they drop careening into the concrete amphitheater (a squatters' arena beneath the Eastside Bridge) that gives the movie its name—as well as suggesting its hero's mind-set.

Mala Noche was a movie about unrequited passion; Paranoid Park communicates a comparable obsession. Van Sant is not only fascinated by the denizens of Paranoid Park; so is his hero, Alex (Gabe Nevins), a hulking yet delicate high-school junior with the clear, grave gaze of a Renaissance princeling (albeit one found by Van Sant—as were most of the teenage non-professional actors here—on MySpace). And Van Sant is also obsessed with Alex, who is pure freshness of youth—navigating his adolescent vicissitudes with an affect that seems alternately present and totally dissociated. The movie's key scene has Alex venturing alone to Paranoid Park. In the Nelson book, he finds himself hanging out with a group of "street punks"; in the movie, it's more like he's been picked up. In both, Alex's musing that he wished he had more feelings for his almost-girlfriend Jennifer segues into his leaving Paranoid Park with an older, vaguely dangerous guy named Scratch, who is going to show him how to hop a freight train. Alex will spend much of the movie trying to articulate what it was that happened next, but it does involve seeing a man sliced in half.

As the TV news intrudes on the film, it also breaks into Alex's consciousness and ours—just as Alex's kid brother does with a breathless account of a scene from the teenage comedy Napoleon Dynamite. There's more inner life here than in Elephant. Nevins, whose line readings imbue the action with a sense of sluggish panic, is most eloquent in his hesitations, and Van Sant's rapport with his cast is easier. A few long takes in which a friendly cop interrogates a roomful of skater kids yield a maximal amount of improvisation. More discreet, the sequence in which the virginal Jennifer (Gossip Girl's Taylor Momsen) seduces the less-than-interested Alex is a matter of mega close-ups and shallow focus. "We're gonna need some more condoms," she exclaims in the afterglow. A high-school cheerleader, she can barely wait to rush into the bathroom and cell-phone her friends: "Ya-ah, we totally did it! Omigod, it was fantastic!" (The dialogue is from the novel.)

Alex finds himself drawn to another girl, less conventionally pretty but considerably smarter than Jennifer. "Figure it out, dude," she tells him—referring to the war in Iraq, but really addressing the mystery at the movie's heart. What's truly uncanny about Paranoid Park isn't so much the nature of the trauma that Alex suffers, but the way his world is made to shimmer with adolescent magic. He may be lost, but Paranoid Park is wonderfully lucid: It makes confusion something tangible and heartbreak the most natural thing in life.

Gus Van Sant on filmmaking and 'Paranoid Park'

Popular theory has it that a hit independent film is a director's ticket to the big-money Hollywood gravy train. But filmmaker Gus Van Sant returns over and over to low-budget land. It's the only way, he says, to make the movies he really wants to create. "It's about control issues [and] not listening to executives," Van Sant says by telephone from California, where he's directing Sean Penn and Josh Brolin in "Milk," a biopic of the openly gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, who was slain in 1978.

Van Sant's latest, "Paranoid Park," opening Friday, is a moody story of a murder in a Portland, Oregon skateboard community that cost $3 million, pocket change by Hollywood standards. It was shot with mostly nonactors. Like Van Sant's "Elephant," a Cannes Film Fest winner made for roughly the same budget, "Park" deals with teenage boys in crisis. Where "Elephant" was an experimental look at high-school life during a Columbine-like moment of violence, his new film is based on a novel about a disaffected teen and an accidental killing.

"I liked the novel because it was sort of a high-school retelling of 'Crime and Punishment,'" says Van Sant. "I also liked it because it was contained in Portland locations [where Van Sant lives], because it was small and because it was about a skate park that really existed." Films about troubled teens have become something of a subset of Van Sant's filmography, which also includes "To Die For" and "Finding Forrester." "It's a genre I guess I find fresh each time," he says. "Those years were the most formidable period in my life. That's the last time you're really living spontaneously. ... You haven't started becoming absorbed into society yet."

"Paranoid Park," which opens Friday, is the latest in a series of lower-budget "art-house" films for Mr. Van Sant, 55. It follows "Elephant" (2003) and "Last Days" (2005), which also explored mortality and angst among the young. These recent films, with their visual elegance and unorthodox narrative styles, have divided critics, but have also cemented Mr. Van Sant's reputation as an American auteur.

Mr. Nelson recently visited Mr. Van Sant in San Francisco where he is filming a biopic about Harvey Milk, the openly gay San Francisco supervisor, and interviewed him about the genesis of his newest film, Portland as muse, the benefits of filmmaking on the cheap and why teenagers make good subjects for film.

Q. How did "Paranoid Park" come about?

A. At the time I was trying to get money to do a film, but it was falling apart. And then I read your book, and I was like, we should just do this. I wrote it quickly, in two days. I outlined the parts I wanted, wrote it out script style, transposing in some ways, not even rewriting. I would take the descriptions and make those scene headings, and then I would take the dialogue and make it dialogue. It was almost like Xeroxing the story. Then I shifted it around and got rid of some of the parts.

Q. Did you feel an affinity to the skate world as a subculture?

A. I had been a skateboarder in the '60s, which was a long time ago, but I didn't think that it was so much different. I worked on a film, "Skateboard," in 1978, so I met the skaters of that time. That type of culture almost gets like gang culture or surf culture, territorial. I didn't think it connected with the characters in the "Paranoid" story. They go to a skate park where the hard-core skaters are, but the real lifer skate people were only an inspiration to your characters.

Q. How did the narrative side of your work evolve?

A. I wrote stories in junior high English class. By then a person is influenced by all the TV shows and movies they've seen. So you have pretty advanced — at least mediawise — storytelling ideas. Things I wrote were like Alfred Hitchcock's's scary stories for young people. Later, in high school, I made a film about a brother and sister who leave the city because they think it's a bad place. It had a weak psychological idea behind it. It wasn't dramatically realized because I didn't know how to do a scene because I was in art class. I wasn't in drama class. I still don't know how to do a traditional scene. I can make it up. But I've learned to rely on my own deficiencies to create what I think of as a story. And having gone through a period where I was into stories that weren't strictly stories, like James Joyce or Samuel Beckett, things that were austere enough so the story was reduced to a very simple idea, almost like a word. In "Waiting for Godot," the story is "waiting," and then all the other stuff is infused into the waiting part.

Q. Do you have one story you always return to?

A. For me it's outsiders living their life. Watching the outsiders live their life. Not necessarily having them triumph or anything.

Q. You've shot so many films in Portland, it feels like an important element in your work. Before you moved there in high school, what did you think Portland was going to be?

A. Dirt roads and stop signs. I didn't know there was a city there. There was a name. I guess I could have looked it up in the World Book. My first image was it would be like Bozeman, Mont. Then when I got there I was like, oh, there's a city there.

Q. What was it like when you first got there?

A. There was a '70s hippie culture, and I guess I felt aligned with that.

Q. What's it like now?

A. The things I learned when I first moved there are the same things that make it interesting today. It's not a big enough city that people really move to or move out of. It gets more cosmopolitan every decade. It's still its own universe. It's a frontier town. And even with an influx of people that have come from the outside, it still retains a small-town existence. Like Boise, Idaho, where the people that are there, they were born there, and they will die there.

Q. Does the gray climate of Portland affect you in any way? I think of Elliott Smith or Raymond Carver; many artists that come out of that area seem to have a built-in gloom factor.

A. I think a person's darkness or lightness factor is their own point of view. I don't think Elliott Smith thought of his songs as dark. Kurt Cobain, his songs were pretty dark. Angst-ridden. And booming. And loud. Later, while working on the movie ["Last Days"], I realized that their songs really sounded like falling trees and chain saws. I don't know if it was an accident or what. They lived in a lumber town. They were using a sound that was relevant to them.

Q. "Elephant" and "Paranoid Park" are your two films about teenage characters. Was there some special approach you used?

A. They were real teenagers. From Portland.

Q. What do you think of teenagers?

A. There's always something new going on with them. They're sort of the creators of the new. If there's something that you see or understand that's going on right now with them, two years later there's some new thing. There's a new generation that's arrived. They're connected to the other generations.

Q. What did you imagine you'd end up being when you were 16 years old?

A. At that time I was painting, so I thought I'd be a painter.

Q. How did you imagine yourself dressed?

A. I thought I'd be wearing a suit. I thought when you were an adult, that's what you wore.

Q. Were there people you looked up to as you came up?

A. Kubrick was a good model. He had an autonomy I've never had but that one desire. He organized things a certain way. And he had a good relationship with Warner Brothers. He was their class act.

Q. I sense you enjoy the small crews and the minimal filmmaking of these recent films.

A. I was really getting into making movies that were unencumbered by rules. Different filmmakers do it different ways. My way was to make something for cheap. It's a good deal for people to give me $3 million for a movie. So they don't have a lot of requirements. If I was looking for $30 million, then they need more requirements. They need movie stars, and they need backup for their money. The drawback is, when they spend small amounts of money, the studios don't tend to release the movie very wide since they don't have that much at stake. Which is O.K. because the films can fend for themselves and be seen by word of mouth

Check out the Angelika Film Center's exclusive interview with Taylor Momsen at:

http://angelikablog.com/index.php/2008/02/22/taylor-momsen-on-paranoid-park

Then head on over to MSN and check out an exclusive clip for Paranoid Park:

http://movies.msn.com/