A giant artery feeding one of the largest middle-class suburban sprawls in the country, the Long Island Expressway snarls like a monster in Michael Cuesta's L.I.E., but as a metaphor, it's closer to a lead weight. As if the acronym didn't give enough away already, Cuesta passes along the startling news that behind every exit, the immaculate veneer of manicured lawns and crisp blue skies may not be all that it seems. To drive the point home further, L.I.E. opens with a shot of the hero, a troubled teenager played by Paul Franklin Dano, teetering precariously on the overpass rails, wondering if the expressway will swallow him up like it did his mother or film director Alan J. Pakula. By now, Cuesta's attitudes about suburban rot have grown familiar and stale, long since picked over by other independents and ushered into mainstream acceptability by American Beauty. (If Cuesta really wanted to shock, he should have made a film extolling the convenience of strip malls and the comforts of cul-de-sacs.) A typical coming-of-age protagonist, Dano is a confused, passive, and impressionable adolescent, neglected by his father (Bruce Altman), a sleazy contractor who's too preoccupied by his buxom young girlfriend to pay much attention to his son. Dano has a poetic sensibility that separates him from the other latchkey kids, though that doesn't stop him from burglarizing neighborhood houses with his buddies. When he's caught breaking into the wrong basement, he attracts the menacing Brian Cox, a Vietnam veteran and pederast given to cruising for boys by an area rest stop. In this topsy-turvy universe, Cox becomes the most understanding and sympathetic presence in Dano's life, even while their relationship is charged with uneasy sexual undertones. Cuesta's insistence on humanizing and partially redeeming an active pederast has gotten him in trouble with the MPAA, which slapped L.I.E. with the dreaded NC-17. Given the rating's disastrous history, it should come as no surprise that Cox's character is the film's most thoughtful and interesting creation, an unsettling mass of conflicting urges and contradictions. But locked into the standard conventions of a coming-of-age story, Cuesta winds up reducing him to a disposable fairy-tale ogre, useful only insofar as he contributes to the hero's emotional growth. Like all the other characters and incidents in L.I.E., he's eventually absorbed by a giant metaphor that consumes everything in its path.