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This scene in Half Nelson comes just after Dan's had a sitdown with his principal, who asks whether he's even opened "the Civil Rights binder I gave you." Dan's not much for following rules. Instead, he has students arm wrestle to get a sense of how opposing forces affect one another.

CLASS STRUGGLE: Dan (Ryan Gosling) keeps the faith and tries to break the habit in Half Nelson.

Dan's take on history is both ideological and personal. Under his students' noses, and not always unobserved, he continues to struggle with drug addiction. "I wanna know consequence," he tells his students. And so he will. While Dan is frustrated by the unfound WMD, he's also preoccupied with his ex-hippie parents and ex-girlfriend Rachel (Tina Holmes). She's sober now, but Dan can't get there. "I tried the rehab thing," he says wearily. "But it didn't work for me." An expansion of Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's 2002 short, Gowanus, Brooklyn, Half Nelson is a study of the "dialectic" between Dan and his most defiant and engaged student, Drey (Shareeka Epps). They couldn't be more different from one another, but they share a sense of cynicism shaded with hope. Andrij Parekh's superb hand-held camerawork makes their views of each other unsteady and curious. They lean back and look from across rooms, over students' heads, through windows, the frame emulating their tentative efforts to see each other clearly. And then she catches him smoking crack in a bathroom stall.

Now the distance between them turns close and hard, their exchanged looks framed by slivers of doorways and revealed as sharp angles. Drey doesn't seem so much startled as disappointed — her brother, mixed up in dealing, is now serving a stint in prison. Dan's eyes are bleary. "I'm sorry," Drey says, then fetches a damp towel to pat his forehead, and he lies back, pale and sweaty. "I'm sorry," he says, "but I'm fine. Just don't go, OK? Just for a minute?" The camera cuts from acute close-ups to a long two-shot from the bathroom doorway, washed out by the fluorescent lighting, the characters' edges blurring into the background.

This moment marks a "turning point" (a term Dan uses frequently in class), a change in their understanding of each other, more than a judgment passed or a trust betrayed. Each "gets" something about the other now. Dan starts giving her rides home from school after ball games. (Her mom works double shifts, which means she spends a lot of time alone.) She inquires about his personal interests, ands asks about a photo of Rachel. When he tells her it's none of her business, Drey knows better: "You put it out there," she says. Their rhythms are tentative but also incongruously easy, probing and respectful, in ways they're unable to be with others.

The opposing forces here become multiple, as Drey worries about Dan and Dan worries about Frank (Anthony Mackie), her brother's drug dealer and boss. At first Frank lurks, offering Drey candy and rides home. When she objects to the Negrobilia in Frank's apartment, he claims property rights rather than discussing history or context. It's his place; he can do what he wants.

If Dan feels too much, Frank resists feeling, and although Drey surely recognizes Dan's shortcomings — not least being that he's white, painfully unhip and unable to take care of himself — she appreciates his efforts. She sees in him an opposite. But he's not threatening, only patient, needy and passionate. As Drey observes Dan, her perspective becomes yours, as the film alters terms and rhythms.

Throughout Half Nelson, Drey and Dan's balances shift. The film sets up contexts for their connections and differences, in brief bits showing Drey and her classmates giving presentations for the class on important turning points in history. As archival footage illustrates their stories, the kids hold forth on Attica, Brown v. Board of Education, Harvey Milk and Pinochet, describing their importance and looking for meanings.

These events and figures embody violent clashes of opposing forces. And though they are now history, half forgotten and half disbelieved, they are also moments that changed someone or helped to transform what followed. Unexpected and potent, these instances interrupted routines. Seemingly removed from what's happening now, especially from the yin and yang of Dan and Drey, they also have everything to do with their efforts to connect, to make sense of each other.

(c_fuchs@citypaper.net)