It's quite a balletic jump from the moribund mining towns of County Durham to the pastel shades of suburban America but Jamie "Billy Elliot" Bell has made the leap.

Undertow and Dear Wendy established the youngster across the pond for his eerily accurate characterisations of disaffected American teens adrift in a sea of adolescent angst.

Here he plays another - Dean Stiffle - a seething mass of teenage neuroses who's further disconnected when his best buddy - and the school's top drug purveyor - hangs himself.

In an effort to get their hand's on the dead dealer's stash, his grasping classmates Billy (Chatwin) and Lee (Pucci) kidnap Dean's younger brother to force him to retrieve what's left of the pill pile.

Unfortunately, they kidnap the wrong kid. But the youngster's disappearance goes unnoticed anyway because his oblivious mother Terri (Wilson) is obsessed with the detail of her forthcoming marriage to Ralph Fiennes' ineffectual town mayor.

The ensuing chaos shocks Dean out of his Ritalin-induced torpor and he's forced to confront this self-deluding world where vitamin supplements and New Age mysticism are regarded as the cure-all of a sick society.

We've visited the dark heart of American suburbia in any number of previous movies including Donnie Darko and American Beauty and found it to be a place of Stepford sincerity masking a bleak vein on insecurity and worthlessness.

This first-time outing for director Arie Posin isn't one of the best examinations of this damaged culture but it does boast a dark wit and a typically effortless performance - replete with spot-on American accent - from Bell.

Tim Evans