All About Igby

BURR STEERS'S TREATISE ON WASP DYSFUNCTION,IGBY GOES DOWN

The world of brittle Wasp dysfunction is limned with the skill of a true betrayer of his class in writer-director Burr Steers's first feature, Igby Goes Down. The coming-of-age black comedy, about a preppy rebel who's whip-smart but unable to stay in school, has parallels in Steers's life: he was kicked out of Hotchkiss and military school, and later dropped out of New York University to act in Los Angeles. Steers, nephew of Gore Vidal and relative of Jackie Onassis and various Auchinclosses, turned to writing as a way of dealing with the 1995 death of his older brother, a painter. His script soon attracted stars such as Susan Sarandon and Ryan Phillippe (whose Locust Valley lockjaw, honed in Cruel Intentions, is here burnished to a fine sheen), with the lead going to the latest Culkin brother, Kieran. Igby Goes Down is a bittersweet backward glance at the American aristocracy for Steers, whose next project is a big-budget Paramount rewrite. "It's dying out,'' he sighs in his own distinctly northeastern tones. "It's so isolated up there on the Upper East Side."

MARC GOODMAN

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