The First third of The Believer is spent making you swallow an absurd, even shocking premise: a Jewish Nazi.

Ryan Gosling plays Danny Balint, a scrawny teenager with big triceps, a shaved head, and a litany of menacing tattoos. The first scene shows Danny targeting an Orthodox student on the subway, then flashes back to Danny's own yeshiva boyhood, spent in fierce argument with his rabbi. The contradictions are everywhere, and rather facile; at first, the movie seems to be a mere exercise in justifying them.

But before long, the self-satisfaction of the conceit evaporates, and The Believer reveals its true nature as a meditation on Jewish self-loathing whose outré façade masks a philosophically--rather than psychologically--inquisitive heart. Unlike most films that are "about" fascism, this one never attempts to make the totalitarian urge attractive or compelling. Danny is hyper-articulate, so you can see the logic behind the statements he makes about the Jews and their love of persecution and abstraction.

But the leap he makes from there to advocating the murder of all Jews is plainly irrational, not just morally, but in character terms; it's a contrivance that allows us to interpolate the complexity of Danny's (Jewish) intellect, its savage (Jewish) willfulness, and the intense (Jewish) longing that accompanies the loneliness those (Jewish) qualities create. But it's a contrivance nonetheless.

The scenes in which he is forced to reckon with his Jewishness (by listening to Holocaust survivors, and by rescuing the Torah when he and his cronies vandalize a synagogue) are the only ones where the discourse weakens, because it's difficult to swallow a Nazi who lays tefillin. At these points, the film becomes a mere study in mental illness, which is less interesting than an examination of a Jew in the ultimate Gehenna.

Since the whole film acts as a metaphor (or "abstraction" as Danny would call it, venomously) about the Jewish identity, it's easy to read it as a hazy allegory for the troubling character of Israel. Danny's militarism grows out of self-contempt and fear born of the European Jewry's failure to stand up to the Nazi juggernaut--but it's transference. He doesn't become a powerful Jew; he becomes a powerful Jew-hater, and an all-purpose thug. His response to power is not to rise against it, but to assimilate it. He's a crackpot pragmatist.

When you hear Israeli brass begin to talk out loud about the expulsion of Palestinians from Palestine, it's difficult to shake the sense of history beginning to repeat itself. The Believer is a powerful assertion of history's eternal nature (the final image is haunting), and of the means by which self-opposition can be the greatest enemy of them all.