Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling) is a schoolteacher in Brooklyn and a drug addict. When one of his students, Drey (Shareeka Epps) discovers his secret they form an unlikely friendship. 

Half Nelson is a film about contradictions and the vice like grip drugs can hold on you, just like the wrestling move the film is named after. 

Dan is an idealistic teacher who wants to connect with his students and teach them via the concept of dialectics. The idea that people with different points of view through reasoning and discussion can arrive at the truth of an idea. The concept that opposing contradictions can be pushed together to find a truth. In other films his students might be calling him, “O Captain, My Captain”. 

But Dan is also a contradiction. A man of values and beliefs. A man trying to do the right thing. But also a man addicted to drugs who goes on benders, endangers himself and those around him and who pushes people away when they get too close. 

As the film unfolds we watch Dan on a downward spiral. The catalyst is an ex-girlfriend visiting. For her, rehab worked and she has cleaned herself up and got engaged. The conflicting emotions coursing through Dan when he sees her are apparent and he does the unthinkable and smokes crack in what he thinks is an empty school locker room where Drey finds him. 

Drey is also in a vice like grip. A black girl with no father, an absent mother working to keep them afloat, a brother in prison for drug dealing and his dealer (Anthony Mackie) as her only friend. How does she manage to stay away from drugs when it is all around her? Even the idealistic teacher with grand ideas is an addict. 

Their friendship is tentative and challenging. But neither makes demands on the other about what is right. 

Half Nelson is a fascinating and superb film that never offers the answers. Its handheld camera roves around trying to find truth in the matter and does not shy away from the contradictions of society. One of the most stark of which is when we see Dan return home for dinner with his family. All of whom are addicts in their own way but to the more socially acceptable drug of alcohol. 

Gosling is genuinely brilliant here and picked up his first Oscar nomination at the age of twenty-six. The scenes where he is high and a combination of euphoric, rambling and completely out of control feel incredibly real and troubling. He portrays a mostly functioning addict with compassion and the idea that someone can be doing right and wrong at the same time. 

As the film comes to an end you will have to decide for yourself if two opposing ideas have come together to find any truth.