Ryan Gosling has his arms full as a do-gooding, dedicated, young, white, liberal history teacher and girls' basketball coach at an inner-city middle school, a voluntary role model who develops a special friendship with a fatherless black girl and a rivalry for her affections with a neighborhood dope peddler. Oh, and his usefulness as a role model, friend, or rival is somewhat compromised by his own crack addiction. That's a recipe for complication, if not quite complexity, and the film -- the first fictional feature by Ryan Fleck, an expansion of his twenty-minute short, Gowanus, Brooklyn -- feels fairly authentic at any second (no credit to the obligatory grainy, wavery photography), but it generates no flow, no pace, no momentum. And the authenticity is compromised a bit, too, by the self-regarding, actorish work of Gosling. With Shareeka Epps, Anthony Mackie, Monique Gabriela Curnen. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd
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