Phil and Emily are joined by actress Fiona Dourif to launch a brand new mini-series, Richard Kelly Reichardt, with the cult classic that started a thousand dorm-room arguments: Donnie Darko (2001).

Richard Kelly's debut premiered at Sundance, opened the same day the Patriot Act was signed into law, and promptly bombed in theaters before Drew Barrymore's Flower Films, a $4.5 million budget, and a generation of video-store rentals turned it into a phenomenon. The gang digs into why it became the movie every college bro swore was a misunderstood masterpiece, and whether it actually holds up a quarter century later.

They get into the big stuff: the tall bunny named Frank, the pocket-universe time-loop mechanics, and that gut-punch ending where Donnie chooses to sacrifice himself. Emily, who has seen this more times than almost any movie in her life, untangles Kelly's "ironclad" explanation, why she prefers the simpler emotional read, and why the director's cut overexplains everything. Fiona connects it to American Beauty and Magnolia, the search for God after religion, and her own time-bending turn in Christopher Nolan's Tenet. And the whole table takes on modern film-discussion culture's obsession with mapping every rule instead of just living inside a story that doesn't quite make sense.

Plus: baby Noah Wyle, the most unhinged high-school teacher ever written, and a stacked early-2000s cast that keeps making you hit pause. Does Donnie Darko hold up, or did it age like the 25-year-old screenwriter dialogue it's built on? Listen and decide.

Follow the show & guests:

Podcast Like It's... — https://www.instagram.com/podcastlikeits

Phil Iscove — https://www.instagram.com/pmiscove

Emily St. James — https://www.instagram.com/emilystjams

Fiona Dourif — https://www.instagram.com/fionadourif

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