It's your last chance to watch Sad Boy classic Donnie Darko on Netflix

Donnie Darko is cringe, but also brilliant — and you've got until Jan. 18 to watch it

It’s night in North Carolina in the early 2000s, and video game designer Cliff Bleszinski is driving his Dodge Viper around, feeling sad. He’s making a macho-but-ruminative video game about chainsawing aliens called Gears of War, and his marriage is failing. The song he listens to on the car stereo is Gary Jules and Michael Andrews’ melancholy piano cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World.”

The scene is Peak Emo. That version of “Mad World” would eventually end up soundtracking an iconic trailer for Gears of War, contrasting the game’s brutal imagery of sci-fi warfare with the lonesome sensitivity of the song. It was a stroke of marketing genius that cursed the world with trailercore. And it wouldn’t have happened without the movie that, I suspect, was the reason Gary Jules’ “Mad World” was stuck on repeat in the CD player of Cliff Bleszinski’s Dodge Viper: Donnie Darko.

There are cult movies that live forever in their own little bubble. There are cult movies that mature over time into canonical classics. And there are cult movies that only miss their moment by the narrowest of margins, and end up changing the culture within a year or two of their release. Donnie Darko is the latter kind of cult movie. Released in 2001, it’s a surreal coming-of-age tale about being an alienated kid in late 1980s suburbia, but it quickly became one of the defining texts of 2000s emo masculine angst. It's streaming on Netflix now, but leaving the service on Jan. 18.

Donnie Darko, the debut of writer-director Richard Kelly, is about Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal), a clever, depressed, rebellious high-school student who sleepwalks onto a golf course and so avoids certain death when a jet engine of mysterious origin falls on his bedroom that night. Donnnie’s sleepwalking is initiated by a hallucinatory dream figure called Frank, who wears a distorted rabbit costume and whispers portentously that the world will end in 28 days.

Those 28 days then unfurl in a dreamlike limbo, during which Donnie also has visions of wormlike spectres leading everyone through their lives on preset paths. Frank lures him into acts of vandalism and sabotage; he starts “going with” Gretchen (Jena Malone), a similarly emo new arrival at school; he has therapy; he clashes with an oily guru played by Patrick Swayze; he becomes obsessed with time travel. As the time to his personal armageddon ticks down, Donnie feels like there’s a loop that needs to be closed.

Donnie Darko sits somewhere between the suburban teen dramedies of John Hughes, the dreamscape soap of David Lynch, the sci-fi parables of The Twilight Zone, and the embarrassing journal entries of a precocious 16-year-old. It’s a coming-of-age drama about mental health with one foot in sci-fi and another in horror. It’s loaded with metaphysical musings about morality, astrophysics, Smurfs, and how hard it is being so special and so clever and seeing the world so clearly and having so many big emotions. It has galaxy-brain exchanges that will make you wince. (Donnie to Frank: “Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit?” Frank to Donnie: “Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?”) It is a portrait of a time when every tortured teenage boy really did have a copy of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time in his backpack. (I should know.)

It’s kind of cringe. It’s also kind of brilliant. There’s no doubt that Kelly, who wrote Donnie Darko in his early 20s, hit a raw nerve for a whole generation of teenagers. Some of the direction and editing is gauche, but that feels appropriate — as do the production values, which are caught in an uncomfortable limbo between the glossy celluloid romanticism of the ’80s and ’90s and the bluish digital netherworld of the 2000s.

Donnie’s world is compellingly realized, and brought to life by fabulously fortuitous casting. Gyllenhaal’s off-kilter intensity and almost violent vulnerability are perfect for Donnie, and he comes with the two-for-one bonus of his sister Maggie, worldly and smirking as Donnie’s put-together on-screen sister Elizabeth. (You feel as though the Gyllenhaals probably still have the same relationship now.) Mary McDonnell is brilliant as their mother Rose, brittle and melancholy, as if she can sense the tragedy happening in another timeline. You get Noah Wyle and Drew Barrymore as improbably hot teachers, Seth Rogen in his feature debut (albeit miscast as a mean bully), and an unhinged Beth Grant as the nightmare dance mom who utters the immortal line: “Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion!” Not every casting gambit works in the traditional sense — Barrymore’s performance is inexplicable — but together the characters are a funny, memorable, and humane tapestry without which the movie’s solipsism and navel-gazing might be too much to bear.

Donnie Darko, a film set in motion by an aviation accident, was released just weeks after September 11, 2001 and died a death in theaters. But it was a huge word-of-mouth hit on home video, and eventually propelled Jules’ “Mad World,” which so powerfully closes the movie, to the top of the charts. Kelly never quite made it — his next film, Southland Tales, was an infamous flop that’s gone on to be its own sort of cult classic — but Donnie could not be denied. He was every 2000s sad boy, feeling his feelings, and dreaming of disappearing in a just and beautiful death.

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Donnie Darko is currently streaming on Netflix, but it leaves on Jan. 18.