This still is from The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, a 2006 film by Justin Lin, his first in a franchise he would totally transform. Here Lucas Black is a street racer new to Tokyo, but soon he’ll become the Drift King, a master of the scene. From here he’ll cameo in Furious 7 before returning in F9, as a mad scientist type who builds the spacecraft the main team need to take down a satellite. Because that’s how far Fast and the Furious has come, people who first appeared as some guy who is good at driving, can come back as a literal rocket scientist and it just be trivia. Lin is behind this expansion in possibilities, directing 5 of the films, starting with street racing and handing off a series with multiple all powerful cyberterrorists.

In the above still you can see an ad featuring MC Hammer, which may seem incidental, but it’s (probably) quite deliberate. Hammer gave Justin Lin the last few thousand dollars he needed to finish his breakout film Better Luck Tomorrow and it’s here we find the blueprints for his Fast & Furious success. Maybe not the reasons it exploded into car-combat and a cyber-car-counter-terrorism, but at least the first steps on that path.

Better Luck Tomorrow is hungry and stylish, the product of a motivated director who cares about and wants to elevate the material. It’s full of time-lapses and other techniques that never quite caught on in Hollywood, being more at home on MTV, who bought the film at Sundance to distribute it.

It starts with two teenagers hearing a pager going off underground, they run to dig it up. There is a body in the shallowest of graves. The story flashes back to the beginning.

Here, at first, it’s just about idle suburban teenagers who become committed urban criminals. A mixed group of drop outs and overachievers, they start with a simple return scam, then selling cheat sheets to their classmates, then taking larger risks; selling drugs, doing heists. Generally breaking the law out of curiosity and boredom. It’s all antics and close calls, no one is really getting hurt, there are no consequences and absolutely no parents either. The parents are there in pictures and expectations, but never in person. I really enjoyed that detail, even the teens who are perfect students have parents entirely irrelevant to their inner lives. No one paying real attention to their children as people, not as long as their grades keep coming in. It’s a period when many parents can’t quite yet conceive of their children beneath the grades and extracurriculars, maybe having forgotten that at the end of raising a child lies the adult you were supposed to be raising. The film is punctuated by word definitions, never big unknown words, but a teenagers idea of the unknown. The main character is learning them to sound smart.

The teenagers keep living in their criminal unreality and it could have been all it was. But then it escalates, it has too, the characters commit a crime they can’t brush off, one that changes who they are and will shape the rest of their lives. There is that body, they go from keeping secrets that could get them in trouble, to one that could utterly destroy their inner and outer lives. It’s a horrible coming of age, a comment on expectation and attention. It makes the movie, the established style and playful tone have hidden this eventuality, but we knew that it couldn’t last. Summer always has to end and they couldn’t get away with it forever. The body was there from the beginning, the ring was their tell-tale heart.

In Tokyo Drift there’s a slightly older guy hanging around with the teens, collaborating with their crimes and tying to mentor them away from real trouble. That role exists in Better Luck Tomorrow too, played by the same actor Sung Kang and somewhat ridiculously the same character Han Lue. This was probably somewhere between a private joke and an easter egg at first, but the character has been brought into the larger Fast & Furious canon. In Tokyo Drift he actually died, which would have ended his presence in the franchise. At first this was avoided by pushing the in-universe date of Tokyo Drift sometime into the future. Then it was retconned into being a revenge killing, giving his death more meaning in a wider context. Finally, Han was just resurrected. It turns out he never died, just slipped into the night and another life, on hold until the right Fast & Furious adventure. This journey matches the franchise, a story growing in outlandishness, with an increasing disinterest in portraying reality. But more importantly it also let Justin Lin continue to hire and work with his friend.

Han is just one connection to Better Luck Tomorrow, Tokyo Drift has much of the same MTV pop culture feel and is also casually experimental with cinematography. A little more refined, but still appropriately raw. There’s crime, teenagers and a general coming of age and consequence vibe. In the Fast & Furious version there’s less lasting damage, the characters experience less change and growth, confined to the inside of their cars. They never go as far as the big crime, mainly sticking to speeding, drifting and other driving offences that impress each other (and girls). Its ending is heroic and unreal. This world is easier than the world Han is from, one where mechanics can become astronauts on a whim and people regularly come back from the dead.