There aren't a lot of movies made about lost promise. "The Lookout," screenwriter Scott Frank's directorial debut, is a pulse-quickening thriller, but what makes it such an interesting and memorable movie is that it is also a thought piece about what happens when personal brilliance vanishes forever.

The Lookout Credit: Miramax

Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) was rich, good-looking and a great athlete, a hockey player who led his Midwestern town's high school team to glory. He was widely admired because he was also smart - the kind of kid who could beat his businessman father at chess - and nice. His only shortcoming seems to have been that he liked to drive fast on back highways with his headlights turned off, daredevil behavior that, on one fateful night, killed some of his friends and left him with brain damage.

Therapy will help with his short-term memory problems and emotional outbursts, but Chris will never be the comeback kid. He lives with another disabled person, a blind man named Lewis (Jeff Daniels, relishing this treat of a role) who coaches him through struggles with tasks as basic as making dinner. In the evenings, Chris drives to a small town over an hour away to work as a janitor at a bank.