'Brick'

A woman with fur around her neck and her hair decorated by a huge corsage has her profile tilted toward a man. Her rouged lips are slightly parted and her lashes cast a seductive shadow on her cheek. This is it: a perfect 1930s film-noir moment. She could be Lauren Bacall; he could be Humphrey Bogart. The way they talk to each other recalls "The Maltese Falcon." But the time is now, the backdrop is a high school in Southern California and the movie is called "Brick" -- brainchild of first-time indies filmmaker Rian Johnson.

Johnson is obviously a bibliophile and a movie buff, with a special penchant for the film-noir genre. The dialogue in "Brick" is culled from Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and their delivery is often an uncanny channeling of Robert Mitchum.

"Brick," however, is not just an exercise in nostalgic re-enactment -- Johnson translates and then transports the ambience of scratchy black-and-white classics to a texture of his own weaving. The brilliance of the scheme is that it's done in all seriousness, with high-school juniors saying things like "What first, tip the bulls?" and "You took a powder last night" as if they had been sporting fedoras and trench coats in their cribs. Johnson doesn't rely on anything so banal as an iconic wardrobe though; the characters appear in hooded sweat shirts and chunky sneakers and spoon cornflakes in lieu of dinner.