A rule to live by, according to Sean Bateman, the seething protagonist in Roger Avary's corrosive film of Brett Easton Ellis' The Rules of Attraction. A nihilistic evocation of the young, wealthy and wasted, The Rules of Attraction is exhilarating in its pitch-black ride through a little slice of hell over the holiday season on an affluent liberal arts campus on the East Coast.

The student body of Camden University seems headed straight to hell. Sean Bateman (a radically against-type James Van Der Beek) lives a life disconnected from human feeling. In too deep with a trigger-happy drug lord, his days are spent dodging dealers and joylessly doing it with just about every girl or porn video in sight. Paul Denton (baby-faced Ian Somerhalder), the sweetly shy Gay Guy on Campus, is pre-occupied with using drugs to seduce every straight boy in sight until he falls for Sean. Lauren Hynde (fresh, likable Shannyn Sossamon) is a virginal beauty pining for her callous ex-boyfriend, obsessed with textbook case studies of venereal disease while working hard to figure out `The Meaning of It All.'

Along the way, we meet Lauren's promiscuous, disloyal roommate Lara (Jessica Biel) and Lauren's promiscuous, disloyal ex-boyfriend Victor (Kip Pardue). The entourage of supporting characters who show up include Mr. Lawson (Eric Stoltz), the "older" professor, not above using grades as sexual currency. Then there's Rupert (a flamboyant Clifton Collins, Jr.), a drug dealer with a price tag on Sean's head and Cafeteria Girl, Camden's token face of innocence, who secretly harbors a love for Sean.

Director Roger Avary (Killing Zoe) labored for fifteen years to bring Ellis' 1987 collegiate social dissection to the screen. Updated for the 21st century but with its nihilism intact, it's actually the first Ellis adaptation I can say I've been affected by - including Less Than Zero, Bright Lights, Big City, American Psycho. I haven't read The Rules of Attraction, but if the nasty and corrupt undercurrent that permeates this film is an indication of a faithful adaptation, it must be a shocker.

I was most intrigued by this film, absolutely awash in cynicism. And while there's certainly no formal education that seems to be going on at Camden, there's no doubt that life's lessons are on display.

Fluidly employing a shifting time structure and multiple viewpoints, Avary moves his film back and forth, from the End of the World Party to the Dressed to Get Screwed Party, from one dorm bedroom to another, letting time fold over onto itself, sometimes in the same scene. The whole process is a bit disorienting, much like the characters in the film. We move through the decadence at a breakneck pace, with style and gusto.

One striking sequence involves two characters on opposite ends of a campus, split-screen, joining in the middle of a seamless shot. And then there's a scene of suicide, set to a classic love song that seems the perfect synergy of acting, cinematography and music. Watch closely and you'll see a range of wordless emotions - trepidation, fear, pain, sorrow and resignation. The camera moves in a most original way. The music becomes terrifying-distorted. The level of the moment is pumped up to epic tragedy, and it packs a wallop.

There's also a trippy four minute sequence late in the film in which Victor journeys around Europe in a rapid-fire verbal and visual rant that highlights his escapades - essentially a randy sexual travelogue - in witty, breathless fashion. The effect is relieving, a comic breather and departure from the campus rot. As a side note…this section of the film is being expanded into a feature-length, digital video production, Glitterati, by director Roger Avary. As it turns out, Avary did follow actor Kip Pardue around Europe improvising and shooting this sequence, and ended up with days worth of footage, including many real-life sexual exploits performed by Pardue and countless European babes, caught on camera. As it stands, this sequence is a mini-movie of such wit that takes on fascinating dimensions knowing how it was really constructed, actor and character interchangeable. Talk about life imitating art.

Though the movie is fairly devoid of human feeling, a big romantic letdown scene, played out in an evening snowstorm, has some heart. It's quickly diffused by a marvelous little sequence near the end of the film, a shot-repeat montage of each principal character "raging" in pain, Van Der Beek in particular embodying a wicked, vampire-like vibe.

If there's anything that didn't work for me in this film, I didn't buy for a minute that Sean was actually falling in love with Lauren. As played by Van Der Beek, he's so selfish and incapable of feeling anything for the majority of the film that his "transformation" is actually more a matter of scripting than any successfully executed or believable human behavior. And there's also some self-conscious, smug philosophy that just doesn't work: "Nobody knows anybody else." Not profound, just naiveté.

The cast is fearless with risky material that could have gone bad in a number of ways in less sure hands. They gamely rise to the challenge of making unlikable and self-absorbed characters worthy of our attention. For Van Der Beek in particular, college life is a long way from Dawson's Creek, and the actor stretches like he hasn't had an acting challenge in years.

"The Rules of Attraction" is a stylish, energetic film. Fascinated with nihilism and a love poem to the death of innocence, it's no coincidence that the conclusion finds the film's most irredeemable character set "free" in a sense, while the sensitive idealists are left twisting in the wind. At Camden, nice guys really do finish last.