Danny Balint (Ryan Gosling) is a violent Neo-Nazi associated with skin head gangs and a movement to try to promote fascism in America. He is also Jewish and under the glare of a journalist who smells a story about this conflict. 

Cross cutting between Balint as a youth where he studied in the Jewish faith and him as a young man spouting hate speech and planning violence towards the Jewish community the film focuses on the themes of self-hatred and religious hatred. 

Danny befriends the leaders of a fascist led organisation run by Lina Moebius (Theresa Russell) and her partner Curtis Zampf (Billy Zane). They see that he is intelligent and articulate and that he could be useful for their cause. But it is his friendship with Lina’s daughter Carla (Summer Phoenix) that begins to accelerate Danny’s struggle with his heritage and his belief systems. 

Carla asks him to teach her Hebrew, read the Torah and explain the Jewish religion. But the act of explaining it to her brings to the fore the conflict already inside him. “Knowing your enemy” can also mean empathising with them. 

The Believer is arguably when Ryan Gosling made his breakthrough from his child actor roots. It is an incredibly brave and powerful performance that lifts the film and shows his dramatic abilities. 

Due to its subject matter and release in 2001 it made me consider it as almost an amalgamation of two other films that bridge the subject matter better and in a more gripping fashion. 1998 saw the release of both Tony Kaye’s American History X and Darren Aronofsky’s Pi. The former featured a blistering lead performance from Edward Norton portraying a Neo-Nazi forced to see the error of his ways. Whilst the latter features an academic dissection of the Jewish faith, self hatred and its protagonist falling apart under the weight of it all. 

The Believer still feels important though despite those other touchstones and it certainly feels like a milestone for Gosling’s career.