Brendan Frye
Played by: Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Created by: Rian Johnson
Long before Rian Johnson wrote and directed Knives Out, he made a movie that was also primarily in the detective and mystery genre. That movie is Brick, his first feature film, released in 2005.
Brick is a bit of an odd and specific kind of movie. It's premise is that it's a hardboiled detective story set in high school. The loner is the private detective, a nerd is his information broker. A cheerleader and a theater drama queen are the femme fatales, the crooks are jocks and slackers, the police chief is the VP of the school, and the kingpin, turns out to be a dorky goth-y kid who is into Tolkien. This all sounds like it makes for a fun comedy but the film plays it completely straight with dialogue straight out of Hammett and Chandler's works (it even has a few lines ripped straight from the Maltese Falcon film adaptation iirc), and it creates this bizarre combination of a low-budget modern teenage drama with an old school 40s-50s dialogue, delivered in the aesthetic of the 2000s. Which honestly, is pretty charming and is kind of funny in its own right.
Brendan Frye, our hardboiled detective, is a loner and an outcast a la Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, often eating alone. He is pulled into investigating a mystery after the weird circumstances that led to his ex's disappearance. Believing that the VP and the police will just muddle the truth, he takes the matter of uncovering the true cause of her disappearance into his own hands. He, of course, has the usual skillset of a noir detective, being a smooth-talker who delivers snappy one-liners and manages to say the right thing at the harshest of times to buy himself more time and being a punching bag who can take the hardest of punches multiple times yet their will still remains strong and unwavering (and boy, does he get beat up a lot in true hardboiled fashion).
honestly, i also had a bit of a tough time following Brick on my first watch, i needed subtitles to fully comprehend the dialogue and some of the poor audio mixing. The plot gets a bit complex and everyone has their own little schemes that's a bit hard to wrap your head around. However, i think the best way to experience most neo-noir movies where the plot tends to be confusing is just to follow the flow of the movie and not overthink. Cause the way Brick comes together in the end kind of ties it all neatly and how the story resolves was so cool, it immediately earned a special place in my heart. I looked for a copy of the screenplay online right after watching it and kind of studied the fascinating beats and pacing and i realized what made Brick stand out for me is how raw it is and how it really feels like a hardboiled story completely ripped from the pages to the screen, no filtering or trying to make the plot understandable, it's just a pure love letter to the hardboiled detective genre. It also benefits from multiple rewatches once you see the complete puzzle. The movie is also just really pretty, it's from the 2000s so it has that nostalgic look accompanied by a bit of a minimalist soundtrack. i wholeheartedly recommend this movie, especially if you're into noir stories and even if you're not, i hope you'll give it a try, it's still a fun mystery drama movie.
