- An inner-city junior high school teacher with a drug habit forms an unlikely friendship with one of his students after she discovers his secret.
- Young Caucasian Dan Dunne teaches history and coaches the girls basketball team at a Brooklyn high school populated primarily by black and Hispanic students. To the chagrin of his superiors, Dan bucks the outlined curriculum of historical facts in favor of the philosophy of historical events, generally discussing the concept of dialectics. As such, he captures the imagination of his students, at least in the classroom. Outside of the classroom, Dan's life is in shambles. He has a distant but cordial relationship with his family. He uses illicit drugs rampantly. Although his former girlfriend Rachel was able to clean up her drug habit, Dan believes that rehab will not work for him. Due to a combination of these issues, he treats women poorly. Thirteen-year-old Drey is a student in his class and a player on his basketball team. Drey has her own problems. Her parents are divorced, with her father a virtually non-existent figure in her life and her EMT mother generally absent as she is always working to provide for Drey. Her older brother Mike is incarcerated for selling drugs for a local dealer named Frank. Mike took the fall for Frank, who in turn protects Drey whether she wants to be associated with him or not. Dan and Drey's relationship changes when Drey catches Dan, believing he is alone, smoking crack in the girl's locker room bathroom. He is totally stoned. Their resulting friendship, which is seen as inappropriate by the few who know, is based on each being unable to deal with their own life, but feeling like they can be at least a minor salvation in the other's life.—Huggo
- Despite his dedication to the junior-high students who fill his classroom, idealistic teacher Dan Dunne leads a secret life of addiction that the majority of his students will never know. But things change when a troubled student Drey makes a startling discovery of his secret life, causing a tenuous bond between the two that could either end disastrously or provide a catalyst of hope.—yusufpiskin
- Dan Dunne is an eighth-grade history teacher in an inner-city school deep in the heart of Brooklyn. He eschews the provided curriculum in favor of off-the-cuff, but deeply heartfelt lectures about the importance of understanding history, rather than just memorizing it. He speaks primarily of dialectics, the tensions between two opposing forces. He is torn between his desire to change the world and his increasingly desperate realization that he can't, at least not in the grand, awe-inspiring ways that he envisioned as an eager, idealistic college student. He started using drugs as a way to escape the pain of life, and it has turned into a crutch that bears increasingly heavy loads of psychological weight. In his classroom, which is populated almost entirely by black and Hispanic students, Dan lectures about how the world is structured into opposing forces, illustrating it at one point by arm-wrestling one of his students. His unorthodox approach inspires them during class, but interestingly enough we don't see its effects outside the classroom. The film focuses on Dan and his relationship with Drey, a 13-year-old student of his who catches him in the bathroom smoking crack after school one day. Drey understands Dan's frustrations with life; she is the child of an overworked single mother whom she barely sees, and spending so much time on her own has made her self-reliant, but also hard on the edges.—alfiehitchie
- Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling) is a young inner-city high school teacher whose ideals wither and die in the face of reality. Day after day in his shabby Brooklyn classroom, he somehow finds the energy to inspire his 13 and 14-years-old to examine everything from civil rights to the civil war with a new enthusiasm. Rejecting the standard curriculum in favor of an edgier approach, Dan teaches his students how change works on both a historical and personal scale and how to think for themselves.
Though Dan is brilliant, dynamic and in control of the classroom, he spends his time outside school on the edge of consciousness. Early in the film we see Dan smoking crack in a school locker room after he coaches the school's girls basketball team. While there, one of his players, Drey (Shareeka Epps) catches him getting high. As the plot moves forward, we learn little about how or why Dan got involved with drugs. We find that a former girlfriend has successfully gone through drug rehab, and that the Dunne family has fissures of its own. But film writer Fleck primarily sets moods throughout the film, leaving large ellipses for the viewer to fill in, rather than directly illuminate Dan's story.
Drey's troubles are more plainly spelled out. Her parents are not together, and her father is irresponsible and seemingly uninvolved in her life. Drey's brother, Mike, is in prison for selling drugs for a neighborhood dealer, Frank (Anthony Mackie). And Drey's mother is constantly working as an EMT to keep the family together. Drey's lack of proper adult supervision make her a target for Frank's operation.
The tension in the film comes from Drey's attempts to save Dan from the consequences of his drug habit, and Dan's efforts to keep Drey from following in her brother Mike's footsteps. These two people are better able to save each other than to save themselves.
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