Brick

“A detective story.”

Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) goes looking for Laura Dannon (Nora Zehetner), his ex-girlfriend, after she vanishes, and the search takes him past the people at his California high school who run its drug trade. Rian Johnson writes the students in the clipped, hardboiled talk of Dashiell Hammett. Brendan has no one at school he trusts, and the only person he is really looking for is the girl who left him.