Twenty-eight days, six hours, forty-two minutes: the countdown of a generation.
Middlesex, 1988. Sleepwalking saves troubled teenager Donnie from the jet engine that drops into his bedroom out of nowhere. A man in a scary rabbit suit named Frank hands Donnie a deadline: twenty-eight days, six hours, forty-two minutes, twelve seconds. And that’s when things get even weirder.
Sundance crowned it in 2001, the distributors didn’t want it, cinemas got it weeks after the twin towers fell: an engine falling from clear skies was unsellable. Buried by broadcast, Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko came back through the feed: burned discs, message boards, pirated from the West to East Coast, Lisbon to Kamchatka, passed between teens like a secret until it became the most revered indie of the noughties. In the wake of the war on terror we all felt like Donnie; in the age of raging populism he hasn’t aged a day. If you were too young then, we envy you seeing this on the big screen for the first time.
