There's nothing funny about Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, another of his cool looks at the strange conduct of affectless American teenagers.

In this case, a 17-year-old boy living in Van Sant's old stamping ground of Portland, Oregon, and obsessed with skateboarding, has accidentally killed a security guard while trespassing in a railroad yard. At the suggestion of a girlfriend, he writes an account of the experience as he recalls it, which, like Van Sant's Columbine-influenced film, Elephant, is in no particular order.

The cinematography by Christopher Coyle and Rain Kathy Li achieves the chilly, detached mood the director is after.