Finally, an intelligent film about teenagers has emerged in the great tradition of American independent cinema. A spectrum once diverse and challenging, currently half-suffocated in commercial clichés and six-figure aspirations, that color nearly every film created for every major film festival, in the hopes of every young filmmaker: to get bought and distributed. Better Luck Tomorrow, a dizzying new film about teenage crime without punishment, is a near perfect marriage of defiant personal expression and marketing savvy, nicely packaged together.

The days of making American independent film as a vehicle for non-traditional, rich characters and counter-cultural mores not found in commercial cinema, are more than distant memories - they're almost dormant. Consider that it was eleven years ago when Ruby in Paradise, by the great Victor Nunez and starring a promising new actress named Ashley Judd, walked away with the grand prize at Sundance. I can barely remember the winners since.

And though "character-rich" films of middling quality like Rebecca Miller's Personal Velocity have had festival success of late, there's no denying the impact Hollywood agents have on film festivals at large. Swooping down annually upon Park City, Telluride and Toronto, these glossy arbiters politick with the next Darren Arronofsky and schmooze with an emerging Steven Soderberg. The buying and selling of young directors, at a premium, creates a trickle down frenzy, which in the name of commerce dilutes the heart of the young American filmmaker. Today he's more concerned with imitation than real life experience, content to regurgitate the movies he's seen rather than stomach the life experience (or absence thereof) he might have had into some kind of cinematic truth. Yes, we are far from the days of Cassavettes.

But now something really interesting has happened in the extraordinary new film, Better Luck Tomorrow. The writer and director, Justin Lin, has seamlessly woven the personal and the commercial into a satisfying and cohesive film that manages to be both uncompromising and commercial at the same time. That this film can more than hold its own with another memorable youth crime picture, The River's Edge, an equally defiant portrait of disaffected and escalating teen crime, is a high compliment.

Better Luck Tomorrow emerges with a moral complexity, richness of character and a disillusioned sense of real tragedy; a great accomplishment in a story that, at it's heart, is a teenaged gangster tale. This is a morality play about kids smart enough to know right from wrong, who choose to do wrong - almost unrepentantly so - with dire consequences for some and ambiguous shrug-offs for others. It's a story where crime can go unpunished, and people can forgive themselves.

But Better Luck Tomorrow, with its typical upper-middle class teens who open the floodgates to run amok over a year of crime, is a canny package of real issues - the pain of racial injustice, the need to carve out an identity among peers, feelings of first love - and the high concept, modern crime thriller, complete with drugs, guns, cheap sex and morals diminished by the highest bidder.

Better Luck Tomorrow charts the rise and semi-fall of an unorthodox gang in a suburban California high school. The gang, four Asian-Americans students under the thumb of the white kids in the school, fuels a provocative dimension on the passive and silent depiction most Asian-Americans are given in movies. It's clear that this group feels oppressed, limited and marginalized, which the film suggests is the seed of all that follows.

At the center of the group is smart, sports enthusiast Ben (Parry Shen), an Ivy-League hopeful who passionately learns new vocabulary words each day while shooting perfect free throws every night. He's a model student and all around good kid, the kind you find doing volunteer work for the local car wash and tutoring others in need.

When the editor of the school paper, Deric (Roger Fan), a politically minded, charismatic leader, clues Ben in to the fact that he's the token Asian on the basketball team and resident bench-warmer, he begins to wake up to the reality of his identity and racial profile in the school. Deric, wild-card Virgil (Jason Tobin), and laid-back, badass Han (Sung Kang), form a mini-syndicate of brewing trouble.

Add to the mix Ben's crush, appealing cheerleader Stephanie (Karin Anna Cheung) and her sickly slick, over-privileged and callous boyfriend Steve (John Cho). What begins as cheating and stealing soon gives way to bigger thrills like drugs, sex, burglary and murder, all performed nearly without remorse, until Ben wakes up one day with a conscience and the whole thing nearly self-destructs.

What's most fascinating about this confident and stylish film is that we witness the rapid descent from good students to bad criminals. It's clear to us up front that Ben is a smart kid with heart and brains, good to his friends and much like any other above average high school teenager - studious, careful, upwardly focused and likable. But there's something missing. He's shy. He's still a virgin. He's lacking in confidence. Along comes this group and soon he's somebody much different, a member of a feared and elite mafia that essentially party all night and intimidate everyone all day - for awhile the price of crime is well worth the rewards.

Ben is a fascinating character and Shen nails the subtle emotional turns that show us up close just how such a stand-up kid inches himself toe by toe, into a slippery-slope lifestyle. Once he steps into the smallest of gray moral areas - committing petty consumer fraud or selling cheat sheets - it doesn't take long for minor thrills to begin a frightening chain reaction of escalation that allows us to deconstruct how and why a criminal life is born.

The racial angles in the film - the Asian students are very clearly ostracized by the white kids and, at one critical juncture, by a carload of Hispanic gang bangers - are potently realized and provide a realistic and acceptable explanation and rationalization for the film's characters. These provide an understanding to where the germs of their teenage mobster behavior begin. That they go over the top and get drunk on the excesses of money, sex and violence goes without saying. That they enjoy it so much is another issue.

The ending of the film is morally and dramatically ambiguous, and the voice over that precedes the closing credits was changed from its harder-edged, cynical and dark original tone of the first showing at Sundance 2002. The new voice over is softer in language and more ambiguously contemplative, and I'm not sure how effective the film's last moment really is. The point of view of Ben's character has been a bit compromised, or lightened, if you will. He's now "unsure of what the future will bring," as opposed to getting over it and going on to college and the rest of life. Still, this is a powerful story, well-acted, well paced and told with a fine sense of the racial and societal pressures on these kids, and the extremes they reach in their glorified teenage mobster excesses.

In the end, I was reminded of Martin Landau's morally flawed character in Woody Allen's masterpiece Crimes and Misdemeanors, who ventures into the dark heart of murder and guilt, and though he "gets away with it," will never be off the hook. In this film, I'm not sure if Ben or the others might share a similar reaction to their crimes. Or if they will put it all down to crazy youth and start a new chapter in life. Either way, Better Luck Tomorrow, with its open-ended challenges and moral gray areas, is a gem.