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Donnie’s antagonistic older sister is a wide eyed, politically conscious know it all who sneaks out at night to meet her boyfriend. His precocious younger sister innocently repeats the dirty words she hears when her siblings fight. Their bewildered parents do the best they can, sending Donnie to a therapist when his problems become too big for the house.

But Donnie’s issues might be too big for the good doctor, as well. One night he is awakened by a voice, commanding him to leave the house. While outside, he meets a boy named Frank dressed in a hideous rabbit suit. Frank tells Donnie that the world is coming to an end in 28 days, but he implies that there is a solution that involves Donnie. In an eerie coincidence, while he’s out, an engine from a damaged airliner falls from the sky and lands in Donnie’s bedroom. The boy relays these things to his therapist who promptly turns white, writes him a prescription and sends him back to school. Donnie has friends there but distances himself from most of the other kids and shows open contempt for his teachers and all other forms of authority. His only kinship is with a pair of eccentric teachers and a beautiful young girl named Gretchen, who seems almost as detached as he is.

But as Donnie continues to see visions of Frank, the man in the creepy bunny suit begins making demands, and in an attempt to fulfill them, Donnie runs afoul of the law and gets himself expelled from school. As the 28 days come to a close, Donnie starts to uncover the truth behind what’s been happening to him. He comes to believe that the world really may be doomed, there might really be a reason a chunk of airplane landed in his bed and maybe the giant evil bunny knows what he’s talking about after all.

If you’ve seen this movie before, you’re nodding your head right now either because you loved it or because you came away so confused you couldn’t remember your own name. If you haven’t seen it yet, you probably think I’m making this up. I’m not, and please don’t feel bad because even Gyllenhaal said he didn’t know what any of it means. Most people seem to consider it a study on teen angst and loneliness, via the context of a young man whose sense of isolation is slowly driving him mad. I could accept that if there was a payoff at the end of the story. When viewed as a surreal trip into paranoid schizophrenia, the narrative flows well until the end, when it disintegrates into dust. Since the film’s release, writer/director Richard Kelly has provided canonical context to the story, and its all available at the film’s website, as well as on the Director’s Cut DVD release.

I’m not going to spoil it for you but if you do ever happen to read any of it, you’ll know what I meant earlier when I made that Doctor Who crack. The writer’s interpretation of his story almost makes it a little easier to just go with “Donnie is Crazy”.

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