Movie of the Year: 2006Brick
The Brick podcast episode of Movie of the Year arrives just in time to appreciate one of 2006's most audacious genre experiments. Ryan, Mike, and Greg are joined by Pete Wright of TruStory FM to dig into Rian Johnson's neo-noir debut, a film that transplants the hard-boiled world of Dashiell Hammett into the hallways and parking lots of a Southern California high school. Few films from this era take a bigger swing, and fewer still land it this cleanly.
About Brick (2006)
Brick is a neo-noir mystery thriller written, edited, and directed by Rian Johnson in his feature directorial debut. The film opened in New York and Los Angeles on April 7, 2006, distributed by Focus Features. It stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Brendan Frye, a teenage loner who pushes his way into the criminal underworld of his high school to investigate the disappearance -- and eventual murder -- of his ex-girlfriend Emily, played by Emilie de Ravin. The supporting cast includes Lukas Haas as the drug kingpin known only as the Pin, Nora Zehetner as the duplicitous Laura, Noah Fleiss as the enforcer Tug, and Richard Roundtree as a vice principal navigating the chaos from the margins.
Johnson wrote the first draft in 1997 immediately after graduating from USC School of Cinematic Arts. He spent the next seven years trying to get it made, with every financier asking him to set it in college instead of high school. He ultimately raised approximately $450,000 from friends and family, shot the film in 20 days, and spent three months rehearsing with the cast beforehand. The score -- inventive and deeply atmospheric -- was composed by Johnson's cousin Nathan Johnson using traditional instruments alongside improvised ones including filing cabinets, kitchen utensils, and tack pianos, all recorded on an Apple PowerBook.
The film drew on hardboiled classics, particularly the novels of Dashiell Hammett, and won the Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. It holds an 80% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and earned three stars from Roger Ebert, who called it a rich source of dialogue and behavior. You can read Ebert's full review at RogerEbert.com. Brick has since become a cult classic and a clear blueprint for Johnson's later work on Knives Out.
Find the full cast and crew listing at Brick on IMDb.
Guest Panelist: Pete Wright
Pete Wright is a podcaster, author, educator, and co-founder of TruStory FM, a podcast production network he has built over more than three decades in media. He has logged thousands of episodes across more than three dozen shows covering film, ADHD, creative process, brand storytelling, and the craft of audio production. His work spans journalism, corporate communications, and graduate-level teaching, where he spent fifteen years working with students on storytelling and media production.
Among his best-known projects is The Next Reel Film Podcast, a deep-dive film discussion series that serves as his primary film-critical home. He also co-hosts Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast alongside Nikki Kinzer, an award-winning show with over a million annual downloads and 29 seasons of episodes since its 2010 launch. In 2024, Pete and Nikki co-authored Unapologetically ADHD: A Step-by-Step Framework for Everyday Planning on Your Terms, a practical guide grown directly from the podcast's community and themes. His debut science fiction novella, Lattice, was published in 2026. Pete's most recent podcast venture is Headstone, a personal series about legacy, memory, and the stories we leave behind. He is based in Portland, Oregon. This Brick podcast episode marks his first appearance on Movie of the Year.
Brick Podcast Discussion: Noir in High School
The central creative gamble of Brick is not simply that it applies film noir conventions to a high school setting. More precisely, it applies them without irony. Johnson made a deliberate choice to play every scene completely straight, and the cast follows his lead without a single wink at the camera. Consequently, the absurdity of the premise becomes the engine of the film's tension rather than its release valve.
This Brick podcast opens with a foundational question: does the noir-in-high-school conceit actually work? The genre's grammar depends heavily on power asymmetry, corruption, and the lone investigator operating outside institutional structures. High school provides all three. Brendan's relationship with the vice principal mirrors the classic detective's uneasy truce with law enforcement. The Pin's basement headquarters functions as the smoky back room. The femme fatale and the enforcer play their archetypal roles without adjustment.
Johnson drew specifically on the novels of Dashiell Hammett -- particularly the Continental Op stories -- and encouraged his cast to read Hammett rather than watch noir films. He wanted the stylistic choices to come from the source material, not from imitation of existing screen adaptations. That decision gives Brick a distinctive texture. Moreover, the dialogue mixes actual period noir slang with invented high school vernacular in a way that creates its own self-consistent world. As Roger Ebert noted, the story never fully clarifies itself while it unfolds, but it delivers a rich supply of behavior and incident along the way.
Genre Bending: What the Brick 2006 Film Is Actually Doing
Brick belongs to a specific 2006 moment when genre recombination was operating at a high creative pitch. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang had landed the previous year playing similar games with noir self-awareness. Sin City had arrived with a maximalist visual approach to the same source material. Brick chose a third path: minimal budget, straight-faced commitment, and an insistence that the formal constraints of the genre could do meaningful emotional work if you simply trusted them.
The genre-bending discussion on this Brick podcast examines how Johnson uses the noir framework not as homage but as architecture. The structure of a hardboiled mystery -- the inciting mystery, the series of contacts, the betrayal, the revelation -- maps onto adolescent social hierarchies with surprising precision. Furthermore, the paranoia endemic to the genre translates naturally into the heightened social surveillance of high school life, where everyone watches everyone and information is currency.
The Spaghetti Western and Anime Influences
Johnson has cited Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns and Shinichiro Watanabe's Cowboy Bebop as visual influences alongside the noir literary tradition. That combination matters, because it explains why Brick never feels purely retro. The film's rhythm and its relationship to violence carry a different energy than classic noir. Notably, Johnson used shoes as a design element for each character, treating footwear as an immediate visual shorthand for who each person is. It's a small detail that reflects how thoroughly he thought through every layer of the film's visual language.
Additionally, the score by Nathan Johnson uses invented instruments -- wine-o-phones, tack pianos, kitchen utensils -- to create an atmosphere that nods to classic noir without reproducing it. The result is a film that works as genre exercise, coming-of-age story, and tone poem simultaneously.
The Treatment of Women in Brick
Noir has always had a complicated relationship with its female characters, and Brick inherits that complication without fully interrogating it. Emily exists primarily as a body -- a mystery to be solved, a loss to be avenged. She drives the entire plot but occupies very little of the film's actual screen time. Laura is more present, but her function remains rooted in the femme fatale archetype: beautiful, manipulative, ultimately revealed as the architect of the tragedy.
The Brick podcast addresses this directly. Does Johnson's decision to play the genre completely straight mean he also reproduces its blind spots uncritically? The case for the defense is that Brick is a formal exercise, and the female characters serve genre functions that the film deliberately signals as such. The case against is that signaling an archetype and interrogating it are different things, and Brick largely declines to do the latter.
Moreover, the pregnancy subplot -- Emily is pregnant with Tug's child, a revelation that triggers her murder -- adds a layer of consequence to the female characters' bodies that the film handles with notable brevity. It functions as a plot mechanism more than a human reality. The discussion examines how this choice shapes the film's emotional center, which ultimately rests entirely with Brendan's grief and not with Emily's life or Laura's survival.
Nevertheless, Nora Zehetner's performance as Laura earns genuine complexity within the constraints the script gives her. The hosts explore whether that performance transcends the archetype or simply executes it with exceptional skill.
Rushmore: 2006 It Boys
The Taste Buds carve out space in this episode for a Rushmore segment dedicated to the It Boys of 2006 -- the young male actors whose stars were ascending in that specific cultural moment. Brick arrives at a fascinating point in Joseph Gordon-Levitt's career trajectory, before Inception and The Dark Knight Rises made him a mainstream anchor, when he was still operating in the cult-film space that Brick so precisely inhabits. The Rushmore discussion considers who belongs on this particular mountain and why that moment produced the specific constellation of young male talent that it did. Tune in to the Brick podcast to hear who makes the cut.
PopFilter Hall of Fame
The PopFilter Hall of Fame segment makes an appearance in this episode, as the Taste Buds consider whether Brick has earned permanent enshrinement. The Hall of Fame is reserved for films that don't just succeed on their own terms but expand what those terms can mean -- films that create new possibilities for the work that follows them. The conversation weighs Brick's influence, its cult staying power, and its role as a proving ground for one of the more distinctive directorial voices to emerge from American independent cinema in the 2000s. Listen to this Brick podcast episode to hear whether Brick gets the call.
Why Brick Still Matters
Nearly twenty years after its release, Brick retains its strangeness. That is not a minor achievement. Most genre exercises age into familiarity; their cleverness eventually reads as mere cleverness. Brick holds because the emotional core underneath the stylistic apparatus is genuinely felt. Brendan's grief is real, even when his dialogue sounds like it arrived from 1934. The loss at the center of the film carries weight that the genre architecture does not deflect.
Furthermore, Brick matters as a document of what independent filmmaking could accomplish in 2006 with discipline and a clear vision. Johnson made the film for $450,000, shot it in 20 days, and produced something that has outlasted hundreds of films made for fifty times the budget that same year. That resource efficiency is itself an argument -- an argument that formal ambition and emotional honesty are more durable than production scale.
The film also matters as the first chapter in a directorial career that has continued to evolve and surprise. Brick established that Rian Johnson was willing to commit entirely to a formal gamble and see it through. That commitment runs as a continuous thread through Looper, Knives Out, and Glass Onion. Understanding Brick is, in many ways, the foundation for understanding everything Johnson has done since.
Above all, Brick earns its place in any serious conversation about 2006 cinema because it did something genuinely new with materials that had existed for decades. In a year full of sequels and franchise installments, that counts for a great deal. Tune in to the Movie of the Year podcast to hear the full verdict from the Taste Buds and Pete Wright.
Related Episodes from Movie of the Year: 2006
- Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story -- Movie of the Year: 2006
- 2006 Bracket Intro Part 1 -- Movie of the Year: 2006
- 2006 Bracket Reveal / Sweet 16 -- Movie of the Year: 2006
- All Movie of the Year Episodes
FAQ: Brick Podcast and Film
What is this episode of the Movie of the Year podcast about?
This Brick podcast episode features Ryan, Mike, and Greg alongside guest Pete Wright of TruStory FM. The Taste Buds discuss Rian Johnson's 2006 neo-noir debut, covering the film's use of classic noir conventions in a high school setting, its approach to genre bending, and the treatment of its female characters. The episode also includes a Rushmore segment on 2006 It Boys and a PopFilter Hall of Fame vote.
What is Brick about?
Brick is a 2006 neo-noir mystery thriller in which high school student Brendan Frye investigates the disappearance and murder of his ex-girlfriend Emily. His investigation pulls him into the criminal underworld operating within his Southern California high school, led by a drug kingpin known as the Pin. The film uses the plot structure and dialogue conventions of classic 1930s hardboiled detective fiction, applied without irony to a contemporary teenage setting.
More Frequently Asked Questions
Who directed Brick?
Rian Johnson wrote, directed, and edited Brick. It was his feature directorial debut, made for approximately $450,000 after seven years of failed attempts to find financing. Johnson subsequently directed The Brothers Bloom, Looper, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Knives Out, and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.
Who stars in Brick?
Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as Brendan Frye. The supporting cast includes Lukas Haas as the Pin, Nora Zehetner as Laura, Emilie de Ravin as Emily, Noah Fleiss as Tug, and Richard Roundtree as the vice principal. Gordon-Levitt carries nearly every scene of the film and was cast after Johnson saw him in Manic (2001).
Is Brick actually a good movie?
Brick holds an 80% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and earned three stars from Roger Ebert, who praised its rich dialogue and behavior. It won the Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision at Sundance 2005 and has become a cult classic. Critics are divided on whether the stylized dialogue is dazzling or alienating, but the film's formal ambition and Gordon-Levitt's performance are widely considered exceptional.
Is Brick based on a book?
Brick is not based on a specific book, but Rian Johnson drew heavily on the hardboiled novels of Dashiell Hammett -- particularly the Continental Op stories and novels like The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man. Johnson encouraged his cast to read Hammett rather than watch existing noir films, in order to source the style from the literary original rather than from prior screen adaptations.
Why does everyone in Brick talk so strangely?
The dialogue in Brick mixes actual 1930s hardboiled detective slang with invented high school vernacular, applied without any signal to the audience that this is unusual within the film's world. Johnson designed the language this way deliberately, treating the dialogue as the primary carrier of the genre. The press notes for the original theatrical release included a glossary. The effect is disorienting at first and becomes deeply immersive once viewers accept the film on its own terms.
What does the title Brick mean?
In the film, a "brick" refers to a compressed block of heroin, roughly the size and shape of a brick. The missing brick of heroin is the MacGuffin around which the film's criminal plot revolves. It also functions as a piece of hardboiled slang that fits naturally within the film's period-appropriate dialogue register.
How does Brick connect to Rian Johnson's later work?
Brick established Johnson's interest in genre as a formal and emotional tool rather than simply as a commercial category. His commitment to playing the genre completely straight in Brick reappears in Knives Out and Glass Onion, where he applies Agatha Christie-style locked-room mystery conventions with the same earnestness. Many critics and fans treat Brick as the essential starting point for understanding Johnson's body of work.
