When a young man named Leland P. Fitzgerald (Ryan Gosling) murders a special needs child he is sent to a juvenile detention centre. There his teacher Pearl Madison (Don Cheadle) tries to help him to open up and explain why he would do such a thing. Meanwhile those impacted by the crime try to come to terms with what has happened. 

Leland is a detached young man. We hear his story mostly through his narration of the notes he makes in the school book given to him by his teacher. He tells us about his relationship with Becky Pollard (Jena Malone) which ended before his mindless act of violence and his non existent relationship with his father Albert T. Fitzgerald (Kevin Spacey) who has been absent the majority of his life. 

His teacher Pearl is just as capable of morally unsound actions. He is an aspiring writer frustrated by the long term absence of his girlfriend as she works on her career and his inability to write. Despite all of the warnings from his boss he breaks every rule at the detention centre to spend time with Leland for the sole purposes of getting material for a book. All while conducting an affair with another co-worker (Kerry Washington). 

Outside of the detention centre we see the Pollard family struggling with their loss. Parents Harry (Martin Donovan) and Karen (Ann Magnuson) are barely coping with their grief and certainly not dealing well with the press scrutiny around the incident. Their daughter Becky, Leland’s now ex-girlfriend relapses into drug use. And their other daughter Julie (Michelle Williams) becomes distant from her partner Allen (Chris Klein), who in turn falls apart at the rejection. 

The result of all of this at times feels ponderous and aimless. A meditation on despair and sadness. Leland’s detachment is matched by his father, whom we see drinking in a bar having returned home but made no efforts to see his son. Pearl is far from the inspirational teacher you might expect from this type of film and the Pollard family are disintegrating. I believe writer/director Matthew Ryan Hoge’s goal was to explore the idea of perspectives. There are a number of scenes where Leland looks at something with his left eye and then his right eye with the camera changing the perspective of what we see based on which eye is open. Leland sees so much sadness that he is trying to explore how to change that. His behaviour and attitude remind me of what little I know of Asperger’s where someone struggles to understand social interaction but I think ultimately it is just simply a case of a teenager being incredibly sad and struggling to deal with it. 

The result is incredibly mixed without a single outstanding performance to suck us in to the story. Gosling is trying to give a childlike innocence to his character but is hamstrung by most of his character development being dealt with via narration. And no one else gets to deliver anything more than one note. It is hard to believe now, but Kevin Spacey’s small recurring cameo would have given the film quite some clout coming shortly after his Oscar win for American Beauty. But now it just feels like a talking point in a film that fades from memory rather quickly.