Indignation

"I am not a malcontent. I am not a rebel." Gifted Newark teenager Marcus (Lerman) leaves behind his family's kosher butcher shop and a pair of anxious parents to make for the small but prestigious Winesberg College, Ohio in 1951. The college's insistence that students attend church ten times a year rankles with the young atheist whose views on spirituality rub up against college dean Caudwell (Letts). Meanwhile his first date with Olivia (Gadon) takes an unexpected turn…

What we have with this character-driven Phillip Roth adaptation (The Human Stain, Elegy) is more a collection of experiences of a young man in his freshman year rather than the expected narrative arc. It's a story that progresses in its own sweet time and refuses to develop in the way one expects. First time writer-director James Schamus (a former Focus Feature head) instead ensures a quiet air of impending doom to hang over everything and allows the dialogue to dominate – it can feel like the film is a series of conversations that touch on the overriding themes of consequence and causality and compromise.

Like Steve McQueen's Hunger, there is a breath-taking centrepiece where two characters clash politely over ideological differences. Summoned to the Dean's office after requesting alternative lodgings when study proved difficult in his noisy dorm room, Marcus is subjected to a character assassination by the Dean. During the fifteen minute unbroken discussion (and it feels much shorter than that) a range of topics are explored: the elitism of fraternities, conformity, casual anti-Semitism, and Marcus is forced to defend his tendency to duck and run when confronted with an opposing viewpoint. As the conversation develops and delicate barbs are traded, both keep a gentlemanly stance despite the inner fury bubbling underneath: it's such a reserved and staid world Schamus allows the one profanity in the entire film to sound like a gun shot. It really is a riveting piece of writing and acting, matched only by a later (but not quite so long) scene involving Marcus and his mother (a wonderful Linda Emond).

If there were doubts that the angel-faced Lerman had little more to give than Percy Jacksons and D'Artagnons there should be none now. After deft turns in The Perks of Being A Wallflower, Fury and Noah, Lerman is asked to bring his most mature performance to date to the table and he doesn't disappoint. Ditto Gadon who juggles strength and hope with deep-rooted melancholy and wholly embraces that Olivia is more than a mere love interest. Meanwhile Letts (writer of Bug, Killer Joe and August: Osage County) impresses as the intellectual but close-minded Dean.

A quiet and delicate film.