The Believer

The Believer (2001) is Henry Bean's unsettling psychological drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Danny Balint runs with a New York skinhead gang, preaches hatred of Jews, and torments anyone who crosses him. The catch: Danny is Jewish himself.

Ryan Gosling plays him years before he was a star, and the performance is ferocious. By day Danny throws fists and spits antisemitic theory at fellow believers. At night he argues scripture from memory and can't stop reading the Hebrew texts he learned as a boy. The film never lets him off the hook, and it never lets the audience look away either. Summer Phoenix, Billy Zane and Theresa Russell circle him as people who see a leader, a lover, or a puzzle they can't solve.

Bean loosely drew on a real 1960s story of a Jewish man who joined a neo-Nazi group and killed himself once exposed. The picture took the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and still ranks among cinema's rawest studies of self-hatred. Stream The Believer (2001) online on iFILM.