Now, Donnie Darko is back. Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut is making its way across the country in limited runs. Most films have to languish on shelves for years before someone finds a reason and the funding to get them up on the big screen for a second time. Donnie Darko has taken the shortest road to a director’s cut, due in part to the cult following it has attracted. The fact that two of its stars, Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal, are now much bigger stars doesn’t hurt. This is writer/director Richard Kelly’s first film. He’s lucky that Drew Barrymore was one of his early champions and producers of the film. That hasn’t hurt Donnie Darko‘s path through the culture either.

Donnie Darko still isn’t attracting mass audiences, but the faithful - and I count myself as one of the faithful - are super excited to see this movie on the big screen. I confess that Donnie Darko is one of the films I am most sorry to have missed the first time around. When I finally did see it, on DVD, it had me at “hello.”

Donnie Darko begins with a boy out on his bike waking up on the road, with a sly smile on his face, as if he’s had a cool dream or a fun night out and about. Donnie Darko moves to what appears to be a comfortable home front, and the dialogue starts at the family dinner table. A handsome looking suburban unit of mom, dad, big sister, brother and little sister are eating pizza. The dialogue begins with big sister (Maggie Gyllenhaal) provoking an argument. “I’m voting for Dukakis,” she says. A loud profane sibling exchange ensues, to the mild amusement of the parents and the little sister.

I was laughing immediately that a movie released in 2001 would feed our culture of nostalgia by setting the movie in a time so close to the present. Donnie Darko begins on October 2, 1988, and works its way, in a weird spooky countdown to Halloween. Finally, just in time for Halloween, 2004, it hits the big screen locally.

Almost as soon as the film begins, a jet engine drops out of the sky onto the home of the Darkos. Donnie sleepwalks, or just takes off, at night, so he is not in his room when the jet engine comes crashing through the ceiling of his roof. His escape from death makes him a freak celebrity at school.

Critics have focused on the time travel elements, the teenage psychosis, the scary 6-foot-tall rabbit and the mood of paranoia in the film. All of these are fascinating strands of the plot. They are interesting and presented with a weird combination of naturalness and fateful conviction, but they aren’t as interesting to me as the human dramas running through Donnie Darko.

Donnie Darko is a potent mix of genres. Psychological thriller and sci-fi time travel are mixed with suburban teen comedy, family drama and hilarious satire of New Age gurus. All these elements are remarkably well blended, but it is the character’s struggles, at home and at school, that are especially appealing.

But this is not John Hughes territory. The dialogue, emotions, actions and events are much darker and sharper, even though the film is also extremely funny. Jake Gyllenhaal is wonderful as the smart, troubled, confused Donnie Darko. He thinks his classmates are idiots. He thinks about sex obsessively. He does not understand what is happening to him or why.

The way the characters interact is believable and not realistic at the same time. Mary McDonnell and Holmes Osborne play Donnie’s parents, and their mix of concern and frustration with their kids is excruciating. Donnie’s shrink, played by Katharine Ross, is a fright, full of doublespeak and rationalizations and more and more prescription drugs. Noah Wylie and Drew Barrymore make surprisingly believable high school teachers.

Also at school is a horror of a teacher, Miss Farmer, played by Beth Grant. She is making her students do exercises that are part of teachings of a New Age preacher, Jim Cunningham, played by Patrick Swayze. Donnie is not impressed with Cunningham’s fear to love continuum. He is more impressed with a book, The Philosophy of Time Travel, about time travel by an ex-nun, ex-teacher named Roberta Sparrow, who is now a crazy lady wandering the streets and nicknamed Grandma Death.

He’s also influenced by Frank, the large rabbit who appears to him and provokes him to do things, like flood the school. I’m a big fan of Harvey, the 6-foot pooka, who helped Elwood P. Dowd get through life, keeping reality from intruding too obnoxiously. Frank has Harvey’s sense of whimsy, but is not a benign life guide.

Is Donnie just a troubled teen trying to get through adolescence, or is he psychotic? Do his meds make him better, or do they cause his hallucinations? Does he travel back in time to fix things? Are there parallel universes? If you are looking for answers to these questions in the director’s cut, you may be disappointed. If you need a movie where everything is clear and satisfactory at the end of the movie, you will certainly be disappointed.

Technically, I’m too old for Donnie Darko, but the way that the movie conveys the struggles of adolescence and modern life resonates anyway. There are timeless touches that help us old timers. Donnie’s English class is reading a Graham Greene’s story, The Destructors, about some troubled teens. When Donnie is asked why they did what they did, Donnie replies, “They just want to see what happens when they tear the world apart.”

Luckily, most of us get over that time in adolescence when the world seems not to make sense. Donnie’s new girlfriend asks him, “Donnie Darko, what the hell kind of name is that? Are you some kind of superhero?” To some of us twisted movie fans, he sure is.