Donnie Darko is a genuine American original, a puzzle box brimming with adolescent anxiety, regret, and confusion that’s laced with beguiling supernatural wonder and terror. A story about longing for love and fearing death and being alone, it reimagines the ’80s as a cine-dreamscape of social tumult, political unease, and pop-culture mania, and it remains the sole masterpiece by writer/director Richard Kelly, who’s yet to recapture its strange and affecting uniqueness. Twenty-two years after its theatrical debut, it remains a singular trip.
Linoleum (in theaters Feb. 24) is a direct ancestor of Kelly’s 2001 debut, so indebted to it that, for much of its runtime, it feels like a deliberate remix. More than half of all the key elements of writer/director Colin West’s feature come directly from Donnie Darko, and consequently, the spell it casts is of a muted “been here, done that” variety. Or, rather, that’s the case until its finale, when it tips its hands and reveals the answers to its own mystery—and, in doing so, becomes a surprisingly moving drama in its own right.
In a suburb of Dayton, Ohio, in what appears to be the ’90s, Cameron (Jim Gaffigan) is the host of a local science TV show called Above and Beyond, in which he expounds on various topics—such as pressure and entropy—that have a direct bearing on his personal life. Cameron’s dad always said that there are two types of people in the world: astronomers and astronauts (i.e., observers and doers).
Though Cameron always dreamed of being a NASA engineer and building rockets, he wound up perpetually Earthbound, much to his chagrin. Compounding his malaise, his wife Erin (Rhea Seehorn) is filing for divorce, this after having abandoned the TV show she created with her husband for a job at a local aerospace museum.
Cameron has additional problems on his plate. His teen daughter Nora (Katelyn Nacon) is an outcast who favors pants instead of the skirts worn by her uniformed high school classmates because she thinks she is a lesbian. His younger son doesn’t speak at all, and his father Mac (Roger Hendricks Simon) is in a nursing home run by Dr. Alvin (Tony Shalhoub), suffering from dementia that’s muddling up his memories.
Moreover, one day while mailing off yet another application to NASA, a car falls from the sky in the street behind him, and its driver appears to be his more dapper, 1950s-style doppelganger (also played by Gaffigan). This stranger is Kent Armstrong, a famed astronaut who’s arrived in town to take over Cameron’s show, and whose son, Marc (Gabriel Rush), strikes up a flirty friendship with Nora. As if that weren’t enough, an apparent Soviet rocket crash-lands in Cameron’s backyard, forcing the clan to move in with Aunt Linda (Amy Hargreaves).
West constructs this tale as a veritable grab bag of Donnie Darko-isms: vehicles plummeting from the heavens; Cameron biking around his community to a soundtrack of enchanting piano; slow-motion shots that follow individuals through high schools hallways and office buildings; classroom teachers and scientists talking repeatedly about “paradoxes;” a teenage Halloween party at which someone is in danger of being run over by a speeding sports car; behind-closed-door secrets of abuse; and a melancholic mood of angst and despair brought about by men and women who don’t know who they are, lament not having or doing what they want, and dread that their best days and opportunities are behind them. There’s even a creepy elderly woman who wanders the neighborhood, seemingly spying on Cameron and Marc.
There’s no escaping the derivativeness of Linoleum, since it wears its primary influence on its sleeve and then shines a spotlight on it just for good measure. Still, in the sense that it assumes Cameron’s adult perspective, the film affords a distinctive twist on familiar material, which soon focuses on its protagonist’s desire to realize his ambition of achieving something “fantastic”—a goal also shared, once upon a time, by Erin— by salvaging the space wreckage from his property and using it to build his very own makeshift rocket ship.
To do this, he sets up shop in his garage, culling parts from disparate sources and enlisting the expertise of his dad, whose mind temporarily comes alive at the thought of aiding his son in this far-fetched project.
Gaffigan’s shlumpy charisma is what gives Linoleum its inviting downbeat energy. The actor radiates convincing middle-aged ennui, desperation and desolation, and Cameron’s endeavor is wacko enough to suggest that the film has more on its mind than mere homage. To that end, the star is well-paired with Seehorn, who—as she did in Better Call Saul—infuses Erin with an external toughness that masks self-doubt and despondence.
Together, they’re a charmingly low-key pair, which is similarly true about Nacon and Rush, whose Nora and Marc are united by their outsiderdom, with Nora a potentially gay kid who dislikes popular shutterbug Darcy (West Duchovny), and Marc a son who’s desperate to live up to his dad’s exacting example but who has a clandestine fondness for wearing women’s underwear.
Best of all, Linoleum has a bombshell in store that reconfigures one’s perception of the preceding action and is handled with poignant dexterity and grace. Ultimately rooted in a universal yearning for acceptance and astonishment, it turns out to be a grander tapestry about the way in which—per Cameron himself—the universe, and every life, is akin to an inimitable fingerprint, full of various shapes and colors that only we can see.
Concluding with a sequence that pulls at the heartstrings with just the right amount of exertion, it answers all its questions at the same time that it says something quietly profound about how we see ourselves (and want to be seen), as well as the great adventures upon which we all embark.
In sticking its landing, Linoleum proves a case study in why no story can be fully judged until it’s over. Moreover, by finding a means of envisioning its inspiration in fresh fashion, it transforms into an example of reverential reimagination done right.
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