Brothers Baddi (Baltasar Kormakur) and Danni (Sveinn Geirsson) live in Camp Thule with their grandparents. Their mother marries and moves with her husband to Kansas in the film's opening reels. We become acquainted with the community's modest everyday life as Baddi travels to visit his mother. When he returns, he sports a rock-and-roll haircut, cops a rock-and-roll attitude, and drives a rock-and-roll car -- a red Cadillac convertible that toodles almost anachronistically down the dusty roads of Camp Thule.

As a disciple of American pop culture, Baddi's presence has a calamitous effect on the Tomasson family's life. He demands that his television set be shipped over from America. He cracks wise, compulsively quoting witticisms culled from the lyrics of rock-and-roll records. Most brazenly, he brings carloads of teenagers home in the middle of the night to twist and shout and wake up the rest of his family. America, it seems --and Kansas, no less! -- has transformed Boddi into a flip, self-absorbed cretin.

Mind you, Baddi isn't a kid whose life was saved by rock and roll. He's no rebel without a cause. He's just an asshole. The film pays no tribute to the vitality of American culture, which includes but is not limited to rock and roll, and instead contents itself with facing off traditional values against the shock of the new.

Even taken at face value as a complaint against the Americanization of the world, Devil's Island (Djõflaeyjan) is pretty dry. For the most part, it gets by on self-conscious whimsy -- the dottering Karolina (Sigurveig Jonsdottir), constantly prattling on about ghosts, is a good example. (There's even a quick dose of Scandinavian quasi-mysticism toward the end, just to help justify Karolina's antics.) Elsewhere, the cliches are cataloged so completely -- Danni knocks over a fence as he learns how to drive, the boys spy on a pretty girl bathing through a peephole -- that you feel you could be watching a movie set in America during the 1950s, rather than the Icelandic equivalent. Despite its authentically dumpy setting, Devil's Island is a disappointingly slight take on cultural imperialism.