Reviewing Donnie Darko back in 2001, The Dallas Morning News’s Chris Vognar wrote that it “may be too ambitious for a debut feature, but ambition and imagination still trump mediocrity any day of the week.” Vognar couldn’t be more right.

There’s no denying that Richard Kelly, who wrote and directed Donnie Darko, crams a lot into his dark fairy tale: teen angst and alienation, young love, high school drama, self-help gurus, ’80s censorship concerns, and of course, time travel and parallel universes. If you try to examine it too closely, it doesn’t quite hold together. And yet there’s no denying that Kelly had a very real vision for Donnie Darko, one he delivers with a confidence that belies the fact that he was only 25(!) when he directed it.

Jake Gyllenhaal delivers a wonderfully nuanced performance in this, his second leading role, and he’s joined by sister Maggie Gyllenhaal, Holmes Osborne, Mary McDonnell, Jena Malone, Noah Wyle, Drew Barrymore, and Patrick Swayze as motivational speaker Jim Cunningham. Those performances, combined with spot-on production design, a killer soundtrack featuring Echo & the Bunnymen, The Church, and Joy Division, and haunting effects, result in a film that might not make much sense but is nevertheless utterly engrossing.