All About Lily Chou Chou

The new Japanese film All About Lily Chou Chou begins with one of those images so powerful you doubt whether the rest will live up to it. A teenage boy, hair swept diffidently over his eyes, stands lost in Walkman-induced reverie amid a field of long grass, tinted a deep lysergic green. As the camera sways around him and production-line pop engulfs the soundtrack, you might be tempted to write this off as one of those emptily chic moments where film is invaded by the imagery and texture of music video.

What we're seeing, however, represents the mental state of a teenager who would rather inhabit a video fantasy than the real world: young Yuichi (Hayato Ichinara) wants only to be engulfed by the music and the myth of pop queen Lily Chou Chou.

Later, another powerful image shows him dwarfed by a huge screen showing Lily's latest video: as the clip fades, he is left standing before a muddy, amorphous shimmer of pixels.

In fact, All About Lily Chou Chou is neither entirely about fan love, nor very much about Lily herself. We barely see her, though we do hear a fair bit of her music: for the most part, a drab stadium hybrid of Garbage-style abrasion and Natalie Imbruglia feyness.

Lily is more talked about than seen, coming alive through the collective delirium of her fans: the screen is repeatedly flashed with extracts from a Lily website, where fans hail her enigmatically as an "embodiment of the ether" – adulation tipping into a hyper- fey metaphysics.

Lily is not apparently one of those virtual pop idols that exist online in Japan – she seems to have a flesh-and-blood existence, even giving live concerts – yet she's an idea above all, one that keeps her alienated teenage fans sane. The narrative, a complex bundle of time jumps, centres on Yuichi who in happier days makes friends at school with Hoshino (Shugo Osahinari), a studious, personable boy; they bond after being teased by ruthlessly giggling cheerleaders. In a lively and luridly-coloured 20-minute video interlude, the boys and their chums go on holiday to Okinawa – by all accounts a surreal place where the shirts are shocking pink and you risk having your head impaled on chainsaw-nosed flying fish.

Then everything changes. Hoshino challenges and supplants the class bully, and turns thoroughly rotten: mooching around in hooded tops is just the start of it. He pimps one girl to middle-aged salarymen and endorses the general victimisation of another, Debussy-loving pianist Yoko Kuno (Ayumi Ito). A traumatised Yuichi retreats into the Lilyverse, where he presides as website manager "Philia" and forms a tender bond with another fan, "Blue Cat" (no surprises when we finally discover who that is). Despite initial fears of a flashy Matrix–style number, as digits whiz before our eyes, the film is unusually level-headed about the internet as nothing more fancy than a place where scraps of text flash up on a screen.

The figure of Lily was loosely inspired by Asian pop star Faye Wong, the gamine trouble-maker in Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express. Before he wrote the film, director Shunji Iwai created a Lily website: presumably, some of the bulletin-board comments we read are from people who gamely played along with his fantasy. In the film, Lily's domain figures as a separate, parallel zone offering her fans refuge from everyday misery. It's only towards the end, when she plays live, that real and imaginary worlds collide, to cataclysmic effect. Not surprisingly, the real action at her concert is in the crowd outside: the climax echoes the Hollywood street apocalypse in Nathaniel West's novel The Day of the Locust.

Such moments show an ambitious sense of scale that gives Iwai's film a scope far bigger than his ostensible subject: the result could easily have been a crueller, trendier Grange Hill. At bottom, Lily Chou Chou is intimate realism, given uplift by a lyrical style that is sometimes over-precious, sometimes magnificent. But Iwai's aesthete delicacy sometimes lets you overlook just how disturbing an essay this is on Japanese school rituals. At the benign end of the scale is the very formal class, where new students announce themselves in brisk embarrassed shouts ("My hobby is karaoke! Pleased to be here!"). At the horrific end is the bullying, which the sympathetic but ineffectual teachers either can't see or turn a blind eye to. The dislocated narrative means that we never entirely understand why these children change as they do, becoming vindictive thugs overnight: but that, the film seems to suggest, is simply one of the awful mysteries of adolescence.

Part of that, too, is to do with Iwai's elastic sense of time: the action seems to cover only a year, yet you feel you are watching a much longer period unfold. Space similarly seems to expand, like the fields around the town, dancing in a spacy, swaying glimmer. The film is shot on high definition video, giving a much finer, more textured image than the digital video used in low-budget exercises. The textures sometimes come dazzlingly alive, the colours surging ecstatically or simply taking on an intense headachy glare to match the characters' wounded sensibility.

Iwai's message appears to be, as Americans tend to say about Larry Clark movies, a "wake-up call". Early on, a middle-aged woman moans that teenagers have become a menace, but seems to feel that until a boy asks to have his hair dyed, there's nothing too much to worry about. Iwai's conservative diagnosis will be familiar to Western eyes: a lack of adequate authority figures, and pop seen as a drug that merely cocoons fans in an anaesthetised conformity.

Put that way, Lily Chou Chou might seem like the ultimate anti-pop movie and there's no doubt that Iwai loves Debussy's piano pieces far more than he does the Lily stadium sound. Or so it seems until the closing credits, when the thrill of Lilyphilia finally communicates in a euphoric burst, in a candy-bright pop number that is part Beatles, part Fiona Apple. Like Lily's repertoire, Iwai's film is uneven, overwrought and a little laboured. But it has the ring of truth when it comes to the tormented psychology, the downright mundanity, and sometimes the pure redemptive necessity, of teenage pop love.

j.romney@independent.co.uk