Review: â€˜Rebels of the Neon God’ an early glimpse of Tsai Ming-liang’s genius

Don’t let the occasional camera movement fool you: The Taiwanese “Rebels of the Neon God� is a Tsai Ming-liang film, the static-take-loving auteur’s debut, receiving a U.S. theatrical release after 23 years.

The film is a clinical, cool-suspicious dissection of disaffected youth maneuvering Taipei’s grimier, noisier corners. It will strike fans of the director’s disciplined, enigmatic classics “What Time Is It There?� and “Goodbye, Dragon Inn� as both accessible outlier and charged testing ground.

Tsai regular Lee Kang-sheng plays Hsiao-keng, a blank, distracted college student increasingly obsessed with the motorcycle-riding thief Ah-Tze (Chen Chao-jung). As their parallel lives intertwine in a plot that mixes surveillance, vengeance, street crime and casual sex, Tsai unfurls a now-signature backdrop of cramped urban blight: dingy living spaces, video arcades, wet weather and motel rooms. (There’s even a sonorous bass-thump theme to drive home the dirge of it all.)

As a first film, it is incredibly accomplished, its influences (French New Wave, Wong Kar-Wai) apparent but integrated. Most telling, though, is that when Tsai uses a camera pan or tracking shot, it feels hesitant, obligatory. But when he locks it down to bask in the alienation, cut after cut, you can see a director falling in love with the poetics of minimalism.

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“Rebels of the Neon God.�

MPAA rating: None.

Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes.

Playing: at the NuArt.