Go<> Against the odds, Go<> uses its clever title in clever ways. Thematically and structurally, it's all about going -- somewhere, nowhere, everywhere. The characters are young, alienated, feeling stuck in LA: they're repeatedly urging each other to "go!'', to hit the gas or get the fuck outtahere. It has attitude. It has that edgy, hand-held, guerilla-film-styled look. It has a seriously sellable soundtrack (Natalie Imbruglia, Fatboy Slim, Eagle-Eye Cherry, and No Doubt), and hip star roster (Sarah Polley, Katie Holmes, Scott Wolf, Jay Mohr, Taye Diggs). And yet, in spite of all its much-hyped too-coolness (including much Sundance buzz), Go<> is good. More observant than cynical, Doug Liman's second feature (his first was Swingers<>) works a series of entertainingly intricate plot moves. Each of the three story lines begins at the same time and place, a point of no return located in a supermarket on an x-mas season afternoon. It's a meditation on choices and fallouts, misunderstandings and good intentions. Whenever the film (written by John August) returns to this moment -- when about-to-be-evicted checkout girl Ronna (Polley) agrees to take an extra shift from her antsy coworker Simon (Desmond Askew) -- the narrative time begins again, like you're caught in a star-trekian time loop. Each plot is identified by the name of its ostensible protagonist, and follows the ongoing consequences of one unfortunate decision after another. While this device occasionally veers into wanna-be-a- tarantino territory, it mostly manages to maintain its own sense of dimension and detail. Briefly and inadequately: Ronna's extra shift and lack of rent money lead her to attempt a one-time and wholly inept scam. While working Simon's checkout station at the supermarket, she's approached by two guys -- Adam (Wolf) and Zack (Mohr) -- looking to score some ecstasy. Thinking she can score off Simon's next-rung source, the ineffably scuzzy Todd (Timothy Olyphant), Ronna convinces friends Mannie (Nathan Bexton) and Claire (Holmes) to go along for the pickup. Lacking the initial necessary cash, Ronna leaves Claire for "collateral'' and then fails to make the deal with Zack and Adam, for legitimate reasons. Todd comes after Ronna with a brutal, monster-minded vengeance. Plot two follows Simon on his one-wild-night in Vegas with his buddies, Marcus (Diggs), Singh (James Duval), and Tiny (Breckin Meyer). Like most movie road trips to Vegas, this one involves prostitution, gambling, and local thugs with fast cars and large guns. The boys make the usual ridiculous dick-driven decisions, leading to the usual reprisals by the aforementioned thugs (who include in their number the sublimely sinister J.E. Freeman). When the boys use Todd's credit card to initiate a fateful lap dance (someone touches what he shouldn't, which leads to macho standing off and gunplay), the plot comes back round to LA, as the thugs pursue the interlopers with a determined, if not very well-conceived, vengeance. The third plot centers on Zack and Adam, and a cop named Burke (unctuous William Fichtner). Burke is certainly creepy enough in his initial incarnation: having busted Zack and Todd, he's forcing the couple to help him bust their Ralph's connection (Simon), then decides to take the obviously unprofessional Ronna because it's easy. Then, when the sting goes wrong, he sets his get-payback sights on Zack and Adam, cajoling them into coming home to meet the wife (Jane Krakowski). This is way-creepy, and not for the reasons you imagine. Burke is a peculiar but recognizable representative of law enforcement today, a little too enamored of suspect-head-slamming procedures (which he demonstrates on Zack), a little too Martian when it comes to social cues and expectations. His pursuit of Zack and Adam is framed by a strangely displaced vengeance, aggressively entrepreneurial instead of being overtly violent (I won't give away his scheme, but it's cockamamie). The weaselly Burke is, incongruously, the most unsettling of the monstrous, egomaniacal vengeance-seekers encountered this night, because his reasons for harassing Zack and Adam are so banal and small: because he can. He wants "his,'' and sees no limits on coercing people to get it. For all this plotty morass and thematic cleverness, the movie is surprisingly coherent. At a time when teen movies seem more numerous than insightful or original, this one treats its young characters as if they have intelligence, ambition, and grit. Confronted by situations that are more elaborate and, in their ways, more ordinary, than the cliche evils of mass media or the destruction of drugs and other illegal activities, these kids seem sympathetic instead of cartoonish. True, the Vegas ordeal is more contrived and predictable than the other two plots, but even inside that, the characters who are not Simon (who's a bit boorish even by the terms of its lucky-stiff whiteboy genre) are engaging because they're as flustered and unnerved as you would be under such preposterous circumstances. But the movie does challenge Simon's stupidity and the thugs' he-man posturing in this plot's mini-denouement: the extremes they all go to make their points are plainly tawdry and trivial, so that the action-hijinks (car chases and crashes, hysterical gunfire) are rather neatly reframed as accidents and recklessness, nothing heroic or even very motivated about any of it. This point -- about the illogic of aspirations, strategies, and even morals -- is made most effectively in Ronna's story, which, while set up first, hangs over everyone else's escapades, coloring our responses to whatever else comes next. Polley's pale, fragile appearance seems at first an invitation to doubt Ronna's sense of responsibility and ingenuity. Ronna's the same character you've seen in one-liner parts in other movies, a bored kid working at a ridiculous job and showing no sign of ambition beyond immediate survival. She's a step up from the standard-issue apathetic raver (she figures out quickly how to sell allergy pills to these kids, represented harshly here as true idiots, trying desperately to impress each other), but she's exhausted by diurnal dullness. Resourceful, ironic, and sympathetic, she's still not going anywhere. But in context --or more accurately, in the series of contexts provided by the multiple plots -- Ronna comes alive. She's more demanding of your attention than the stereotype she might have been (and the stereotype that Claire tends to be). She's too clever to be doing what she's doing, too restless to be so confined, too cagey to be so trampled by chance. And yet, here she is, representing no one and everyone who resembles her, going nowhere and everywhere.