Paranoid Park is a 2007 coming of age teen drama film written, directed and edited by Gus Van Sant.

Alex, a 16-year-old skateboarder, rides a freight train clandestinely with a man named Scratch whom he has just met at the Eastside Skatepark, known as "Paranoid Park".

During the melee, Alex hits him with his skateboard and the guard, losing balance, falls onto another track into the path of an oncoming freight train which cuts him in half.

For example, he throws his skateboard into the Willamette River from the Steel Bridge, and when he arrives at his friend Jared's house, he showers and disposes of the clothes he had been wearing.

Gus Van Sant chose to adapt American author Blake Nelson's novel Paranoid Park into a film of the same name because it was set in his hometown of Portland, Oregon, because he was an amateur skateboarder himself and because he found the story particularly interesting.

On the page, he posted an open casting call for males and females aged 14–18 who were "skaters, honor roll [students], cheerleaders, punks, drama kids, musicians, artists, student council [members], athletes, award winners, class skippers, photographers, band members, leaders, followers, shy kids, class clowns".

[12] Jake Miller, originally from Boise, Idaho, was on a road trip in Portland when he heard about the casting call and decided to audition with his friends.

[39] Manohla Dargis of The New York Times described Paranoid Park as "a haunting, voluptuously beautiful portrait of a teenage boy" and as "a modestly scaled triumph without a false or wasted moment".

He concluded his review saying, "Paranoid Park is wonderfully lucid: It makes confusion something tangible and heartbreak the most natural thing in life.

[2] Writing for New York magazine, David Edelstein opined that the film was "a supernaturally perfect fusion of Van Sant's current conceptual-art-project head-trip aesthetic and Blake Nelson's finely tuned first-person 'young adult' novel".

He felt that Paranoid Park was different from Van Sant's previous "experimental" films in that "it works", though he criticized Nevins's "clinically inexpressive" acting.

[43] Rolling Stone's Peter Travers awarded the film 3.5 out of 4 stars and commented that the combination of the soundtrack with the "visual miracles" of the cinematography, "a defiant slap at slick Hollywood formula, is mesmerizing".

[45] Alternatively, William Arnold of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer graded the film as a C+ and described it as "a movie about its teen hero's inability to express his feelings: to himself, to his parents, to his friends and, unfortunately, to the audience".

[46] Salon.com's Andrew O'Hehir wrote that Paranoid Park's "highly aestheticized and stylized depictions of teenage life sometimes seem as if they were shot through the wrong end of a telescope".

[19] The film's soundscapes—described by Sam Adams of the Los Angeles Times as "a wash of foreign noise"—were mostly made by musician Ethan Rose and described by Van Sant as "very complicated".

[6][56] LA Weekly's Randall Roberts praised the soundtrack highly, writing, "It doesn't happen too often that a film's music will tweak my visual and sonic filter to such an extent that I actually perceive a whole class of people [skateboarders] in a new light, with more depth or empathy or whatever.