The first film based on a book by postmodern transgressor Bret Easton Ellis to also count the author’s name among its screenwriting credits, THE INFORMERS is lit with a cold, cologne-commercial sheen not unlike the one that charged AMERICAN PSYCHO (2000) with a sensation of sharp disconnect. But rather than an absurdist satire (an approach that director Gregor Jordan rejected by excising the original script’s vampire subplot and oddly lighthearted tone), this sprawlingly dreamlike drama is an interlinking-narrative mosaic about (mostly) young and rich lost-soul Californians who, tragically, barely register as they struggle below a thick layer of decadent superficiality in the mid-1980s. That it’s closer in mood and subject matter to the early Ellis adaptation LESS THAN ZERO (1987) than to such later interpretations as PSYCHO might be a reflection of the source material, a collection of short stories that Ellis wrote in college a full decade before they were published in 1994.
   
THE INFORMERS’s ensemble cast consists of the up-and-comers (Jon Foster, Lou Taylor Pucci) that populate the cadre of fair-haired kids who sleep with each other to vainly suppress their depression, and, as the broken adults who surround them, a bevy of veteran actors known for riding the line between character performer and movie star (Billy Bob Thornton, Mickey Rourke, Kim Basinger). From both camps come characters whose buried longings and heartbreaking battles with morality only flicker and occasional twist just below their dead gazes. Brad Renfro is an exception, however, as a compromised hotel doorman--the addled heart he wears on his sleeve leads to a lonely redemption. Something similar can be said about the not-quite-so-noble Informers frontman Brian Metro (Mel Raido): as the British rock star tours California, his tortured hotel-room debauchery sends a cascade of strangely galvanizing sadness over the movie’s adjacent storylines.