Sean Bateman (James Van Der Beek) is bored and angry. As usual. It’s getting late, his face is bruised from a recent drug-dealer beat-down and he’s scouting potential action at the End of the World Party. True, he’s already fucked most of the desirable girls at Camden College. But, as he puts it, “I’m a vampire, an emotional vampire. I feed off of other people’s real emotions.” And so he pursues his prey. “Who would it be?” he wonders, in voice-over.

The girl he thought he wanted before she rejected him for being mean, self-involved and generally hateful, Lauren Hynde (Shannyn Sossamon), is also looking for a partner. Hoping to lose her virginity before the night's over, she ignores Sean and instead pretends to be interested in a film student's pseudo-philosophical rap. Her voice-over reveals that Lauren wants to get with Victor (Kip Pardue), but he's nominally unavailable, supposedly dating her roommate, Lara (Jessica Biel), who's more "experienced." (She once "did the whole football team," indicated in a brief, raucous flashback.) Determined to change her own life, Lauren drinks enough to pass out in the film student's room, then wakes to find herself being videotaped by said student, as his buddy rapes her.

At the same time that both these movements come to tawdry climax, Paul Denton (Ian Somerhalder) is trying to make his own predatory dreams come true. Having been rejected by Sean, he hits on a football player. Bad idea. Even if he was inclined, Pretty Boy can't possibly engage in such an act in his dorm room. He makes a grand display of kicking Paul out the door, so the girls in the hall are sure to know that he's Not Gay.

All this action comes at the beginning of The Rules of Attraction, Roger Avary's adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' 1987 novel. Avary used to write with Quentin Tarantino, then made the creepy Killing Zoe; here he's found his ideal point of departure: kids on collision courses. He transforms the novel into a crisp, unnerving dissection of human desires and cruelties. Where Ellis got at different, simultaneous points of view in the usual way -- brief, separate, sequential prose sections, each named for the character speaking -- Avary goes for a less literal, more dazzling visual commotion. As Lauren's section ends, the film speedily rewinds, sort of, until it picks up someone who might lead you to the next story, and then again, when Paul's portion is done, it zips back to show Sean's ghastly prowling.

The rewinding trick escalates after these first scenes, which actually constitute the end of the story. From here, the movie goes back in time, Pulp Fiction-style, to the beginning of the semester, before everyone turned so miserably self-destructive. The nonlinear structure might have seemed merely gimmicky, but here it makes thematic as well as stylistic sense. Paul, Sean, Lauren and Lara live in a kind of accelerated isolation, afraid to connect and afraid to be alone, afraid to move and always in motion. (Perhaps the most compelling instance comes in the recap of Victor's European tour, a little over a minute on screen, accompanied by his restive voice-over, listing brief impressions: Amsterdam, Paris, Dublin, Barcelona, Switzerland, "like a Polanski film.")

A dark rejoinder to conventional "college movies," The Rules of Attraction offers little in the way of broad humor or endearing characters, romance or resolution. That's not to say the characters don't comprehend the abject nature of their milieu. But their self-awareness leads not to resistance, but immersion. School sucks. When Lauren does attend a "tutorial," her professor (Eric Stoltz) invites her to give him a blowjob to guarantee her grade. Instead of going to classes, they party desperately (despite Lauren's efforts to dissuade herself by looking at medical textbooks picturing the effects of venereal diseases). Instead of imagining a future, they descend into a furious, ongoing present, focused on sex and drugs.

Sean (brother of American Psycho's Patrick) is a half-assed dealer, apparently just to be one, which means he must negotiate with local thugs as well as nonpaying clients. His visit to Marc (Fred Savage) ends not in payment, but in an exegesis of "time"; while The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari plays on his widescreen TV, on mute, Marc holds forth on clocks: "They interfere with your ability to adjust time to suit your needs." (The scary part is, it makes sense.)

And yet, in the midst of all this ugliness, the film conjures a moral framework, in large part out of sight for its protagonists. Sean believes he's getting love letters from Lauren, which makes her seem, momentarily, desirable, a vague means to redemption. Paul believes that Sean's visits to his dorm room to listen to his "faggoty synth-pop CDs" mean something. And though all the speeded-up chaos comes to a dreadful halt when one student commits a bloody, bathtub suicide, her reasons remain a mystery to her fellows, though you know she's driven because she feels invisible, unnoticed by the callow object of her affection.

In other words, attraction respects no rules, except perhaps that incessant self-absorption, inspired by privilege and ambition, leads to missed opportunities, frustrations and frequent acts of violence, of all kinds.