The Believer Review

Henry Bean took the outline of Daniel Burros, the American Nazi Party member whom the New York Times unmasked as a Jew in 1965, and built from it something stranger than a case study. What holds the picture together is Ryan Gosling, twenty when he shot it, playing a fascist whose antisemitism is indistinguishable from theological argument. He is best in the yeshiva flashbacks, where his fury at a God who would ask Abraham for Isaac is already the entire character.

The sequence in which he helps vandalize a synagogue and then cannot stop himself from rescuing the Torah scroll is the sharpest thing Bean does, and the sensitivity session with camp survivors, where an old man describes a bayonet and Danny answers with contempt and then cannot breathe, is played without a false beat in it. The fascist salon around Billy Zane and Theresa Russell is much weaker, a set of talking points in good tailoring, and the plotting goes slack every time Danny leaves the room. The film was also shot cheaply and looks it, with flat interiors and coverage that rarely finds the right place to stand.