Half Nelson

Gosling's best work is still his Jewish skinhead character in Henry Bean's overlooked The Believer. Thin and wiry and often looking as though he just stepped out of a Death Cab for Cutie song, Gosling is the emo Brad Pitt. His turn in the lovesick geyser The Notebook seemed hand-delivered by the Postal Service, and now with Half Nelson, he's entered into Wilco territory (with a soundtrack by Broken Social Scene), and he's trying to break your damn heart again. But Gosling, as Dan, a Brooklyn junior high school teacher hooked on crack, has met his match in the smoldering realism of newcomer Epps. As the 13-year-old Drey, who discovers her teacher passed out on the floor of the girl's bathroom, Epps inhabits the character of a kid whose latchkey home life is already a steadily mounting train wreck: Her mother, an EMT, is less a factor in her life than her drug-dealing Uncle Frank (Mackie), whose siren song of making a way out of the ghetto by stoking its own self-perpetuating fires is counterbalanced by Dan. Frank and Dan are already aware of each other via the back-alley drug trade, so when this idealistic teacher (he's way into dialectics) gives Drey a ride home one day and sees the cagey Frank trolling around, it's like a pair of gunfighters squaring off against each other. But Fleck, working from a script he co-wrote with Anna Boden, eschews black-hat/white-hat moralism in favor of something rarely seen these days: grey-hat realism. Half Nelson, with its bleakly hopeful view of humanity both damned and redeemed – simultaneously – is uncomfortably, almost exactly right. Epps plays Drey silent, introspective, yet crafty, too. She's been around enough dopers to read the signs, but her knowledge of Dan's shadow life gives her a power over him a simpler child might abuse. But Drey's not simple, and neither is Dan. And thankfully, neither is Half Nelson.