Paranoid Park is adapted, with reasonable fidelity, from Blake Nelson's young-adult novel. But in telling the tale of a Portland skater kid involved in the accidental death of a railroad bull, Van Sant comes close to inventing his own film language. The chronology is shuffled and the narrative dealt out as a succession of subjective impressions. Paranoid Park is both loose and structured, fluidly shot in 35mm, Super-8, and videotape by Chris Doyle and suavely jagged in its editing. There are passages that approach pure cinema, though never abstraction, grounded as the action is in Leslie Shatz's layered sound design, an audio mosaic that effortlessly integrates Nino Rota, Beethoven, obscure whispering, and a 1974 pop ballad with a trippy organ riff.

High school is a terrain of infinite interest to Van Sant, and, in a sense, Paranoid Park is a companion piece to his Columbine-inspired Elephant. The institutional corridors are automatically haunted. In its sensuous appreciation of a particular subculture, however, Paranoid Park also echoes aspects of Kenneth Anger's underground mix of Brooklyn bikers and Brill Building anthems, Scorpio Rising. Van Sant's skateboarders are shot as though participating in the Olympics: Beautiful young boys twist and hurtle through space in fetishizing slow motion, defying gravity before they drop careening into the concrete amphitheater (a squatters' arena beneath the Eastside Bridge) that gives the movie its name—as well as suggesting its hero's mind-set.