Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run is a film that bursts off the screen, a frantic exercise in style. There is not a single boring moment in this film which pushes forward (and back and forward again) with the kinetic energy of a videogame. It doesn’t delve deeply into the lives of its characters, but it does have a very real message at its core: life can only be lived in the present. The outcome of any given event is never certain; much is up to chance - of course, it’s impossible to get as many chances as Lola does.

It begins with a phone call. Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu) is in desperate straits, having misplaced the money he was supposed to deliver to his gangster boss. He calls Lola (Franka Potente), his girlfriend, and begs her for help. She tells him to stay calm, she’ll think of a way to get the money – 100,000 Deutschmarks – before he has to meet his boss. With only 20 minutes until the meeting, the clock is ticking.

Lola decides to go to her father, a banker with whom she has a less than ideal relationship. None of the characters is given much depth, as the story requires them to have little dimension. Even Lola, who drives the story forward, is a flat character whose most defining characteristics are her bright red hair and the fact that she runs. Nevertheless, we do get some small insight into this relationship that adds flesh and blood to both characters. He’s not her biological father, a fact which he divulges in the heat of the moment and in the same breath as he informs her that he’s leaving her and her mother for his mistress, whom he has just learned is pregnant. In just a few lines, the film is able to give the sense that he’s never been a father in much more than name. When she explains that the money is for Manni, he asks who Manni is – surprising given that she and Manni have been dating for a year and she still lives at home with her parents. He doesn’t know much about her, doesn’t listen when she speaks – but she has listened to him and knows, for example, that the police never come in time to stop bank robberies.

From the point when Lola runs out of the apartment to see her father, the narrative ceases to be linear and begins to loop back on itself. There are three stories of how Lola gets (or doesn’t get) the money to Manni, how her decisions en route affect the outcome, and how the lives of tertiary characters are affected by their brief encounters with her. The three stories are self-contained and yet there is a sense that Lola learns from each story in a way that helps her in the next. For example, in the first go-round, Lola has no idea how to use a gun and Manni has to instruct her on how to remove the safety. When she gets hold of a gun in the next round, she knows instinctively to take the safety off. She’s like an athlete whose personal game improves with each match, an idea that is underscored by the brief prologue to the narrative proper when the man we will come to recognize as the bank security guard informs us, “the ball is round, the game lasts 90 minutes, everything else is pure theory. Off we go!”

Tykwer has a lot of fun with his premise and there is a relaxed feeling to the way the film is directed which is surprising given the chaos of the story. There is a delightful sense of mischief in his storytelling, from the way that he inserts a group of men carrying a long pane of glass across the street (the fate of the glass depends on the version of the story), to Lola’s penchant for screaming at the top of her lungs - so loud, in fact, that she shatters glass, which is reminiscent of The Tin Drum – and having her go to a casino and bet it all on the number 20, which is of course the number of minutes she has to get to Manni with the money. The end result is a film that is unique and endlessly watchable.

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