Adam Stephenson, the writer/director of Cyberpunks, has said he was going for a Degrassi sort of feel with this film. If you don’t know Degrassi, it's a series of Canadian shows set at a fictional high school. The setting may be fiction, but the teenagers who populate it seem real. These are the kinds of kids that American television has given up on, substituting them for super-rich, super-conceited and super-superficial jerks.

So I'm happy to report that this movie in no way resembles One Tree Hill. (For one thing, the actors don't look they were born in the early '80s.) Stephenson takes the Degrassi feel and transposes it onto a stylized setting. The plot is nonsense - something about hacking into and shutting down power sources remotely - but it doesn't matter when everything looks so great. The hair, the clothes, the music, the attitude - all of it is done right.

You can tell this was a very ambitious project. The world may have been even more richly imagined in Stephenson's head, and he may have been forced to make compromises. But what ended up on screen is still great. The humor works really well. I like the scene in the principal's office where the kid is pretending be the main character's dad and he says, "Put me on speaker phone. I want to sense his fear!" I also like when the shy kid compliments the main girl's uniform in the hallway and she inexplicably barks at him. Stephenson's style sometimes calls attention to itself, like when he shoots from the floor up for no good reason. But there are exquisite moments of pure style. I love everything set in the arcade. The dolly shot along the floor as kids play Dance! Dance! Revolution; girls with pink hair; dudes with cool shades - it's like anime come to life.

The acting is amateurish at best and there are obvious moments of bad ADR, but again, the look is everything. It was shot on a 16mm Arriflex, giving a vibrancy and crispness to the images. There are scenes here that could be called art, like when a shoot 'em up video game cuts to what looks like real footage of a kid lying face-down in a pool of blood. Or when the main girl changes the color of her lips by licking them. I can't wait to see what else this director has in store for us.