Hasidic orthodoxy and gangsterism duke it out in this drama of a young man's fall from grace. Jesse Eisenberg plays Sam Gold, a 20-year old Brooklyn Jew who, thwarted by the straightlaced world around him, falls in with a local bad boy (Justin Bartha).
Soon he's earning big bucks as a drug mule, importing Ecstasy from Amsterdam to New York and making puppy eyes at the sexy unkosher girlfriend (Ari Graynor) of the Israeli gangster running the outfit. Antonio Macia's script juggles several moral hot potatoes – family, religion, guilt, sexual desire – and somehow contrives to drop all of them in a feeble second half. Eisenberg, brilliant at these nervy naifs, takes the character as far as he can but is finally let down by a film that can't decide on an arc or an ending.
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