Normally, you wouldn't want to pay attention to a story told by a guy who admits, right off the bat, that he's "not that good at creative writing." But Gus Van Sant's haunting and immediate Paranoid Park understands adolescence as a kind of first draft, a series of raw experiences unmediated by wisdom, and as a result it allows its verbally-challenged protagonist to narrate in his own imperfect voice, rather than imposing a Wonder Years-style voice-over conscience. The films in Van Sant's recent long-take trilogy (Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days) took sensationalistic news stories from real life and then stripped them of all causality, as a way of portraying human activity as essentially random and undetermined. But Paranoid Park is a deeper and even more bracing step into the unknown for the veteran filmmaker, a fully subjective probe into the consciousness of a young man and a generous display of artistic empathy.