Half Nelson Review

Shareeka Epps holds this film. She plays Drey as a thirteen year old already expert at managing adults, and her stillness opposite Gosling's sweating, charming, collapsing history teacher is what keeps the story from flattening into a case study. Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden shoot on 16mm with a handheld camera that sits too close, so faces stay slightly out of true and the school corridors carry the grain of something recorded rather than staged.

Gosling's Dan Dunne is specific in a way screen addicts rarely are: the pipe in the locker room is less unsettling than the way he talks fast and generously at the front of a classroom, high on his own performance, then cannot finish a sentence at his parents' dinner table. The dialectics lesson is the one piece of machinery that shows. Fleck returns to it so often that the idea of change arising from opposing forces stops being a teacher's tic and becomes the movie explaining itself.

Anthony Mackie's dealer needed more scenes than he gets, and the Frank and Drey thread resolves on assertion. The last image, the two of them on a motel bed with nothing settled, refuses the recovery arc everything before it has been quietly inviting.