Richard Kelly's directorial debut. A commercial disappointment on release that became one of the most-discussed cult films of the early 2000s. Jake Gyllenhaal and Frank the rabbit.
Middlesex, Virginia, late October 1988. Donnie Darko is a 16-year-old high-school student with a history of psychological treatment, sleepwalking episodes, and recent prescription-medication compliance issues. He sleepwalks out of his house on the night of October 2nd; an aircraft engine of unknown origin falls from the sky and destroys his bedroom. Donnie survives because he was not in the room.
Donnie begins to experience visions of a man in a grotesque rabbit costume named Frank, who tells him the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds. The film tracks Donnie across that period — his school life, his developing relationship with a new student named Gretchen, his confrontations with various adults including his motivational-speaker neighbour Jim Cunningham. The film closes with Donnie returning to his bed on the night of October 2nd and accepting the aircraft engine's destruction of his bedroom — having, by the film's framing, time-travelled through a parallel universe in which the events of the film occurred and chosen to die in order to prevent them.
Donnie Darko opened in late October 2001, six weeks after the September 11 attacks. The opening sequence — an aircraft engine falling into a residential American neighbourhood — was, in the contemporary cultural climate, almost commercially fatal. The film grossed $7.5m worldwide on a $4.5m production budget; it was widely considered a commercial failure on release.
The film's cultural rise occurred entirely on home video and the early DVD market. By 2005, Donnie Darko had become one of the most-rented and most-discussed cult films of the early 2000s. The film's specific cultural moment — late teenage to early twenties American viewers across the 2002-2008 period — produced an audience for which Donnie Darko was structurally important in ways the mainstream theatrical audience had not registered. The film's cultural footprint exceeds its commercial trajectory by a substantial margin.
Two distinct versions of Donnie Darko exist. The Theatrical Cut (2001) runs 113 minutes; the Director's Cut (2004) runs 134 minutes. The two cuts have substantively different structures. The Director's Cut includes extensive on-screen text from a fictional book called 'The Philosophy of Time Travel' that explains the film's time-travel mechanics; the Theatrical Cut leaves the mechanics significantly more ambiguous.
Most critical opinion considers the Theatrical Cut the stronger film. The ambiguity is, in this reading, the film's substance; the Director's Cut explains too much and resolves the dramatic uncertainty that the Theatrical Cut preserved. Richard Kelly has argued the opposite position — that the Director's Cut represents his original intention and the Theatrical Cut was constrained by studio interference. Both versions have been continuously available since 2004. New viewers are typically advised to start with the Theatrical Cut and seek the Director's Cut subsequently if interested in the explicit time-travel framework.
The film's closing sequence — set to Gary Jules's cover of Tears for Fears's 'Mad World' — is among the most-quoted single sequences in early-2000s American cinema. The sequence cuts between the various film characters in the moments immediately following Donnie's death, with the audio of 'Mad World' over their reactions. The cumulative effect is one of the most-emotionally-direct sequences the film delivers.
Gary Jules's cover, recorded specifically for the film, became a UK number-one single in 2003 — two years after the film's release — partly on the strength of the Donnie Darko association. The cover has subsequently become culturally significant on its own terms, but its initial cultural penetration is inseparable from the closing-sequence framing the film established.