Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lukas Haas. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, April 7, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

High school is tough enough without having to solve mysteries and bust up crime rings all by yourself. Taking a literal page from the detective novels of Dashiell Hammett, first-time writer-director Rian Johnson fashions a variation on adolescence in which ordinary students are called yegs, cops are bulls, and there are regular beatings in the parking lot.

Johnson's vision closely resembles that of a high school in San Clemente, California, but peopled entirely by middle-class kids seething with gangster rage. The tale centres on Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as Brendan, a presumably easygoing high-school student thrown off course when, as we learn through flashbacks, his girlfriend 1) dumped him, 2) disappeared, and 3) dragged him into a dangerous world of thugs and drugs. (The title refers to some powdery stuff that goes missing.)

Bespectacled and shaggy-haired, Brendan initially seems more of the reader type, and indeed, what comes out of his mouth when riled is pure Philip Marlowe, fearlessly blowing off the few authority figures on hand.

Along the twisted route to finding out what happened to his erstwhile moll, he also encounters a sultry rich girl (Nora Zehetner), a sexy would-be actor (Meagan Good), and the local drug kingpin (Lukas Haas, brooding with cape and cane).

On the acting side, Brick is a study in withholding. Gordon-Levitt, who travelled from Third Rock From the Sun to Gregg Araki's tough Mysterious Skin, has morphed into a magnetic young actor. He disgorges reams of hard-boiled dialogue, making it seem as natural as this stuff can ever sound. There's never a wink at the audience. The tough-guy poses might be just that, but the kids here believe them-and that, in itself, is remarkably redolent of being an anguished teenager.

What you take away from Brick is its relentless mixture of high and low cultures, with the absence of parents or authority figures-like Peanuts as redrawn by Raymond Chandler, with shots of Shakespearean angst for good measure. It just goes to prove an old adage: you can't make a good Hamlet without breaking a few yegs.