Growing up

"Film is about communication—but so is music. So is the Internet. So is homicide. Everyone has a message they want to get across, so it seems natural for humans to interpret film as having deeper meanings. But maybe that’s not the real story. Maybe there’s no message at all. Maybe film criticism is one more exercise in human egotism, and films we label groundbreaking are simpler than we think. Much of "Donnie Darko"’s conflict takes place in Middlesex Ridge School. The first real journey through those doors is taken in slow motion, accompanied by the Tears For Fears ballad “Head Over Heels”. This is the fifth chapter on the DVD edition of the Donnie Darko director’s cut, also titled “Head Over Heels.” The phrase seems out of place in a DVD full of chapters whose labels are rather straightforward, such as “Going Together”, the segment in which Gretchen agrees (if you can call it that) to be Donnie’s girl and “Inappropriate Methods”, containing the firing of Karen Pomeroy. It’s just a song, right? Nondiagetic sound, as the film students would say? Maybe not. A closer look at the lyrics reveals that perhaps the film and the song share more than just an obsession with time.
The clumsy but oddly sweet romance between Donnie Darko and Gretchen Ross is handled well in the film—“well” meaning “subtly,” of course. It can be argued that the most romantic scene in the entire film is Gretchen’s refusal to kiss Donnie on the way home from school.
It takes Donnie and Gretchen nearly the entire film, in fact, to express physical affection in any way, shape, or form. Their time together is quiet—a hand held here, a brief kiss there, and yet the two characters form the strongest bond out of any two characters in the entire film—except, perhaps, the bond between Donnie and the dark rabbit of his nightmares. [...] The flames eating at Cunningham’s portrait are nicely symbolic, but Donnie cares nothing for the metaphor he’s unwittingly created, nor for the child pornography he accidentally exposes with his crime. The deed is done—fitting punishment for a man who thinks himself fit to tell kids their own ambitions. “No one knows what they want to be when they grow up,” Donnie laughs into the microphone at Cunningham’s question-and-answer session."
by L. Jablonski, Source: Metaphilm.com.
"Brendan (finely played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is the world-weary, wisecracking student shamus, whose search for his ex-girlfriend Emily (Emilie de Ravin) draws in upper-crust low-lifes closely fitted to the stock requirements of both film noir and teen TV drama: double-dealing femmes fatales, knuckleheaded musclemen, drug-addled drifters.
But "Brick"'s more sensitive than that. What it borrows from noir is not simply a set of style cues, but a sense of obsessiveness, solemnity and encroaching social breakdown, which serves as a satisfying metaphor for the self-enclosed, self-regulating society occupied by teenagers. "Brick" uses its melodramatic plot to replicate the sense of life-or-death significance that characterises subjective adolescent experience. The gumshoe's disgust in the face of spiralling moral turpitude is blended, in Brendan, with the adolescent's fear of growing up and joining the corrupt world of adults." Source: Bfi.org.uk