Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang's singular aesthetic seems to have already been fully formed in this, his first feature. A brooding, mordantly comic meditation on familiar Tsai themes of urban alienation, the fracturing of the nuclear family, and the difficulty of connection, Rebels of the Neon God establishes the austere cinematic language that would recur in his later films. Centering on the misadventures of two petty thieves (Chen Chao-jung and Jen Chang-bin), the movie offers a somber snapshot of the state of Taiwanese youth, depicted here as hopelessly dissolute and addicted to fleeting distractions -- in this instance, the narcotizing lure of arcade games. Tsai alter ego Lee Kang-sheng, who has starred in every one of the director's features, plays Hsiao-Kang, a student who becomes obsessed with the thieves and drops out of school to follow them around. His motives never explained, Hsiao-Kang ultimately visits retribution on one of the thieves, engineering a comeuppance that is at once satisfying and poignant. The movie bears all the hallmarks of a Tsai movie: dilapidated interiors, a minimum of dialogue, and the symbolic omnipresence of water. Perhaps more maudlin and less rigorous than Tsai's other movies, Rebels of the Neon God nonetheless offers a compelling introduction to his distinctive world view.