KEY POINTS:
Herald Rating: * * * *
Cast: Ryan Gosling, Shareeka Epps, Anthony Mackie
Director: Ryan Fleck
Running time: 102 mins Rating: R16, contains drug use, sex scenes and offensive language
Screening: Rialto, SkyCity Queen St
Verdict: An inspirational teacher picture devoid of the usual pieties is driven by a brilliant performance by Gosling.
Violently allergic to "inspirational teacher" stories, I approached this indie feature apprehensively, but writer-director Fleck and co-writer Anna Boden, reworking their own 20-minute short, not only sidestep all the cliches of the genre, but upend them. And the movie is anchored by a remarkable performance by Gosling - an honest, fragile, generous and self-effacing piece of work, for my money, should have won him the Oscar for which he was nominated.
He plays Dan Dunne, a renegade Brooklyn high school history teacher who ignores the syllabus and encourages his (mainly black) students to think outside the box (they spend time talking about what "the machine" might be that a civil rights leader refers to in old news footage) and finds time to coach the junior girls' basketball team. Oh, and he spends most of his off hours smoking or snorting coke.
When one of his students, Drey (Epps) finds him, wasted, crack pipe in hand, in a toilet cubicle, she doesn't use her sudden power. She is clean but is part of a dysfunctional family circle held aloft by drugs (an uncle - Mackie - is Dan's dealer) and the pair of them form an unspoken and improbable alliance as they try to stand upright in the winds that batter them.
Dan is alive to the irony of trying to protect Drey from the world that threatens to devour her. "I'm the last person," he says at one point, and he can't even finish the sentence. But this film, scrupulously devoid of the usual pieties, is full of such edgy contradictions. The three main performances are beyond praise really, but Gosling is a knockout: from the small mouth-mopping gesture he makes a signature of the role to the precision with which he (abetted by Fleck's editing) evoke the junkie's fevered, quiet desperation.
The film as a whole feels a bit overstretched, and the inferences we are invited to draw when Dan goes to Mum and Dad's for dinner are a bit glib. A tripod would have improved matters, too: the hand-held camera mostly works but there are moments - and the last, marred shot is one of them - when a little stillness would have worked better. But this is a brave, smart and sensitive film.
