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The movie's got a lot to offer in terms of characterization. At heart, it's a movie about societal dysfunctions in middle class America at the end of the 80s and about a youth that felt disenfranchised from the mindless exploits of an increasingly neoliberal/conservative system - the strictly religious high-school being an obvious analogy + the phony self-help and televangelist craze that also manifested itself at that time (eg. Patrick Swayze's character and his shallow doctrine).
Then there's the helplessness of Donnie's parents in the face of his possible mental illness (from their point of view), a general air of apathy that is even mentioned by Drew Barrymore's character (paraphrasing here: "We're losing them to apathy...". Granted, the whole time-travel/multidinsional stuff can be a tad confusing and might be a sign of Kelly losing himself a bit too much in his weird mythology, but there's so much more than that to the movie.
And as a mystery it works nonetheless, it's got the perfect look and feel to it, the performances (especially Jake Gyllenhaal's) are intriguing and it moves with a certain uneasy tranquility that I found to be quite unique.
I always enjoyed it as both a character study and a mood piece. And on that it delivered in spades. And I never thought the whole dimensional stuff took center stage, there's just too much other stuff that was quite compelling about it. If I didn't care about the journey of the characters, I would of course not have enjoyed the atmosphere as much as I did. That is quite an accomplishment.
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