Half-Nelson

Half-Nelson breaks the heart because it’s the only film I’ve seen since maybe Requiem for a Dream that not only portrays a hard drug user (a crack-addled history teacher Ryan Gosling) as sympathetic and well-rounded but more impressively for a movie of this type, portrays a drug dealer (Anthony Mackie) as a fully formed character, and not the cliché he could have been easily. And Brooklyn girl Shareeka Epps is excellent as the old-beyond-her-years middle-schooler torn between these two deeply flawed but possibly redeemable men.