Rain splatters against the phone booth glass, drops falling like the embers of fireworks spiraling in the distance. Their trails are lit by an indistinct whirl of city lights, perhaps cars or fluorescent signs, made obscure and thus somehow entrancing, their uncertainty of form promising riches and wonders. The beads of water are like liquid jewels, a beautiful contrast against the soot-streaked interior. Two boys huddle inside, hungrily passing cigarettes between them, then inserting a screwdriver into the terminal. A waiting bag is filled with the phone’s bounty, loose coins a pale imitation of those glittering lights – but here in the city, all truly bright things are indistinct and out of reach.

Stories of disaffected youth all ring with a similar tenor, but their details differ, and it is details that compose a life. To seek the universal means your work represents no one; seek to authentically capture one lived experience, and all the thousand textural details of that experience will worm into our minds, offering recollections of heavy rains and damp jackets and fickle lighters from our own experiences. Rebels of the Neon God follows four youths through a trove of such memories: the two coin thieves Ah-tze and Ah-ping, the girl Ah-kuei who comes to know them, and Hsiao-kang, a truant cram school student who sees something beautiful in the city lights, and assigns the purpose he cannot find to Ah-tze’s retreating back.

The need for something more than that ephemeral glow, the hope that life offers more than this, motivates all of the Neon God’s supplicants. Ah-ping offers his friends a trick: $300 trapped between glass cups, which you cannot retrieve with either your hands or your feet. How do you claim it? A fair metaphor for their lives, where happiness or purpose always seem so close, yet somehow impossibly out of reach. There must be a trick to this, right? Ah-ping returns, and blows the glasses apart. Ah, so that’s what it was.

Hsiao sees that “something more” in the life of Ah-tze himself, seemingly free and noble upon his motorcycle, the equally aimless Ah-kuei clinging to his back. In that brief moment their lives seem glamorous; while Hsiao sits nursing grudges in his father’s cab, Ah-tze smashes the side mirror and drives off, unbound by the mundane disappointments of cram school and nagging parents. A moment of misunderstanding that dooms both of them, as Hsiao sacrifices his standing in pursuit of that rebel-without-a-cause glamor, seeing little difference between Ah-tze and James Dean. But such feelings are always fleeting; they are the brief elation of Born to Run, the gallant rescue of Terror in Resonance, the momentary concluding giddiness of The Graduate. The next morning always comes. The drain still needs to be fixed.

Most of the film explores that comedown, the countless static, inert moments in between those brief highs. Pain is taken in exploring the dull, clammy corners of Ah-tze’s life, as he sleeps in a perpetually flooding apartment, covering his ears to blot out the banging through the walls. Would-be rebels are constantly lighting cigarettes and striking poses, but each butt is soon extinguished, and followed as it circles the drain. Ah-kuei waiting to be picked up, checking her appearance in the circus mirrors of the arcade trawl. Hsiao stabbing a roach with his compass, then smashing his own window as the corpse clings to its exterior. “Do you have nothing else to do with yourself?” asks his mother. If only.

That cockroach serves as oracle, foretelling Hsiao’s fascination with Ah-tze’s life; eventually, Hsiao will desecrate Ah-tze’s bike with the same compass, using the tools of his abandoned cram school to destroy something free and beautiful, and perhaps maybe claim such beauty for himself. It feels good to hold such power, as Ah-tze holds over Ah-kuei, abandoning her in bed just as his brother did before him. When we have so little, we cannot help but be petty tyrants, lording over our fiefdoms like the rebellious Neon God himself. The one thing Ah-tze possesses, the icon of freedom in his impoverished life, destroyed because Hsiao saw a glimmer of himself reflected in Ah-tze, a vision of what he might become if he surrendered to the movements of the city. The glass distorts as it illuminates; what seem like gems blotted by rainfall are no more than arcade lights.

Neon God’s parallel narratives emphasize their cages, with constant shots echoed across the lives of Hsiao and Ah-tze, moments of preparation and striving and bitter disappointment. These cages enclose further as the film progresses, each of our floating protagonists drawn back towards the earth by necessity, by failure, by the pursuit of worried parents or furious shopkeepers. Hsiao’s grand quest to join the rebels ends with a brief “fuck off” from Ah-tze dragging his ruined bike, the only time they actually interact. Each of them ends worse than they started, grasping for intimacy in ruined apartments and dial-a-date cubicles.

But how can they do anything else but hope? Are we expected to live in disappointment, knowing only that tomorrow won’t be different or better than today? Even Hsiao’s mother prays to the Neon God, hoping for something better, at least for her son. Choose religion, choose love, choose the allure of the city lights – but we must choose something, something better than a continuity of failure extending far past the city limits. Ah-ping asks only for a girl to hug, beaten past recognition by the toll-takers of rebellion. Ah-kuei says “let’s leave this place,” but cannot imagine another.

Rain beats against the glass as we depart, making the city an indistinct whirl of glowing embers, each glamorous and full of potential. But in the morning, clearer eyes remind us they are just construction signals, charting a narrow path off into the distance. It was only ever a trick of the light.

This article was made possible by reader support. Thank you all for all that you do.