Give a disaffected teenage boy in American suburbia a skateboard and you'll keep him happy for a day. Give Gus Van Sant a disaffected, teenage American skateboarder in suburbia and you'll keep him happy for aeons.

The director revels in crafting films set within the blank confines of modern youth culture, so much so that Paranoid Park's amateur thesps were cast via MySpace.

For the most part - as with Van Sant's outstanding 2003 high school film Elephant - the non-professional approach works well.

Gabe Nevins gives a calmly affecting performance as Alex, the rosy-cheeked mid-teen who, eager to play with the big bad tearaways in Paranoid skate park, rides a freight train with an older boy, inadvertently killing a security guard en route.

But it's cinematographer Chris Doyle who shapes the arthouse film into a living thing. Disjointed, non-chronological scenes glue Alex's choppy memories to the traumatic aftermath of the event in a woozy, surrealist swirl of slow-motion skateboarding and fly-on-the-wall close-ups.

Long periods of scriptless silence intersperse Alex's jerky, non-fluid narration of his self-effacing secret, and a deliriously intricate score comprising rap, country, classical music and noises like a suffocating bird squawking ties it all together.