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.
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.
