Starring Ryan Gosling, Billy Zane, Theresa Russell, and Summer Phoenix, the film follows Daniel Balint, a Jew who becomes a neo-Nazi.

[9] It received four nominations at the 17th Independent Spirit Awards, Best First Feature and Best Screenplay for Bean, Best Male Lead for Gosling, and Best Supporting Female for Summer Phoenix.

The film begins with a continuing series of flashbacks into the childhood of Daniel Balint, a young Jewish yeshiva student.

Afterward, Daniel and his neo-Nazi friends pick a fight with two African-American men, get arrested, and are bailed out by Carla.

He spends the night with her but returns to his ailing father's home where he is harangued by his sister Linda for his Nazi beliefs, but she also urges him to stay and have Shabbat dinner.

The men watch TV, which is forbidden on the Sabbath according to some Orthodox Jews, leading them to commiserate on the incomprehensibility of Jewish law.

He continues to meet with Lina and Curtis, who want to start an above-ground movement to bring fascism into the political mainstream, inviting Jews, blacks, and liberals.

When news breaks that Manzetti was killed, Lina suspects Daniel, since he proposed the assassination, but Drake is the real killer.

He soon runs into an old friend and his fiancée, Stuart and Miriam, who invite him to a Rosh Hashanah service, assuming that he is an anti-racist skinhead.

"[13] Time Out said, "the film is driven by Gosling's revelatory performance ... arresting, prickly, vaguely funny, even—'difficult' in the best sense.

The tenets of Zampf and Moebius' political movement receive such scant attention that the scenes devoted to it are borderline ludicrous, and the masochistic impulses that seem to draw Carla to Danny—"Hurt me!," she begs at the start of their first sexual encounter, and he willingly obliges—are rote and undeveloped.

"[15] Julie Salamon for The New York Times said, "This willfully provocative film portrait (...) offers lots of raging, vulgarity and shock but little insight into the character's psychopathology.

[16] David Germain for The Washington Post said, "Even as he commits hate crimes and becomes an anti-Jewish rabble-rouser, the youth is torn between contempt for Jewish passivity during the Holocaust and reverence for the traditions of Judaism.