In Mysterious Skin, Joseph Gordon-Levitt gets battered and bruised when, as world-weary teen hustler Neil McCormick, he accepts a ride from a truly evil john. As an audience, we're a tad ashamed to be so intimately involved in a beautiful boy's fall from the only grace he's known. In his latest role, Levitt, thin as a reed, gets pummeled around quite a bit as the too-cool-for-school private detective Brendan Frye, investigating the shooting death of an ex-girlfriend at the hands of an elite group of kids selling drugs at his high school.

While Skin's brutal assault and anal rape in the shower serve as a kind of divinely ordained wakeup call for McCormick, the relentless screen violence in Brick is intentionally cartoonish. Brendan is punched in the face an insane number of times by a sexy lout, Tugger (Noah Fleiss), the muscle for an anorexic gang-leader known only as The Pin (Lukas Haas). Brick (the title refers to a missing chunk of high-grade dope) incubated in the mind of first-time director Rian Johnson, a man with a real hard-on for the classic American detective story, who was determined to avoid the clichés of the genre by putting his characters in a high-school setting that resembles the lonely plains of a Sergio Leone Western.

Watching Brendan get punched around the parking lot after first carefully removing his granny glasses, I kept wondering what Johnson had in mind when he thought up this plucky hero who's unafraid to get hit and not above landing a sucker punch or two. Johnson says Brendan is really a tribute to his literary hero, Dashiell Hammett. "Hammett's main guy was the Continental Op, whose main asset was his ability to take an absurd amount of physical punishment. We put Joe through the wringer in Brick, but it's nowhere near even the mildest of Hammett's stories. The masculine mystique of the detective character, whether by Spillane or Hammett, is that he just keeps getting up, no matter how hard he's hit. There's that amazing scene in Red Harvest where the detective has been up for 72 hours, and he lies down in a bathtub filled with ice for 10 minutes to shock his system into staying awake. That's what we try to grab a little of in Brick ."

Both Johnson and Levitt got a harrowing lesson in the difference between violence on the screen and real life when a well-designed fight sequence suddenly turned into a very genuine fist in the face. "Noah Fleiss is punching Joe repeatedly. On the seventh take, Fleiss actually connected with a punch, and Joe went down. Joe was out of it for like an hour. In movies, you see people get it in the face all the time and shake it off, but that's not the way it works in real life."

Trunk show

In Brick, Brendan pops up and down like a cartoon character: beaten down by Tugger, Brendan sucker-punches a mouthy jock; is locked, bleeding, in a trunk; served cookies and apple juice by The Pin's clueless suburban mom; and interrogated in an Orwellian but darkly funny scene by veteran action actor Richard Roundtree.

In person, Joe Levitt likes it that I label him a screen cartoon. "I'm glad you bring up Wiley Coyote, because Looney Tunes were definitely a big influence for the physicality and the whole rhythm of Brick . The violence in Brick is not an attempt to depict how darkly morose human beings can be towards each other. Brendan doesn't believe in fighting, he's not a martial artist, he just wants to find out what happened to his ex-girlfriend, and he doesn't care who has to get kicked in the shins to get it done."

Levitt did Brick right off his award-winning turn in Skin. "Brick and Mysterious Skin were very different preparation processes. Brick was this immense technical challenge — he's struggling and fighting — whereas Neil in Skin is just taking it easy. I remember an early conversation I had with [director] Gregg Araki. He said, 'Don't think about it too much,' and that was my approach: just kind of letting it happen."

The fight scenes in Brick compare favorably with the astonishing sex episodes in Skin. Levitt noted that they're not at all gratuitous. "Hitchcock never showed anything and those stories got told fine, whereas with Mysterious Skin, I don't think the story could be told if he just cut to before the sex and after the sex. Because it's not just a sex scene, it's a scene with all the real beats contained in a dialogue scene."

Levitt's favorite moment in Skin occurs when Neil McCormick is at the baseball park. "You see him being an announcer, then a dumb-ass with his buddy, and sweet with this little kid. In one scene, it all turns on a dime."