REVIEW: Holy Rollers Blinks in Its Glimpse at Unseen World

The Hasidic community is mysterious to outsiders, and for good reason. This isn't a group that reaches out to strangers, preferring to keep themselves isolated in their own neighborhoods, where they can follow their own long-established mores and customs while avoiding dangerous distractions. We're not supposed to look at them as if they're time travelers from the 19th century, but seeing the men dressed uniformly in their somber, loose-fitting suits, the women in their ankle-grazing skirts and dark helmet-shaped wigs, it's hard not to. These are people who don't want the modern world to find them. How could outsiders -- all of us swept up in the modern world whether we like it or not -- not be curious about that?

The most remarkable thing about Kevin Asch's debut feature Holy Rollers -- in which Jesse Eisenberg stars as Sammy Gold, a young Brooklyn Hasid who's lured into the drug-trafficking business precisely because he's so innocently ignorant of the ways of the world -- is that it treats its characters as individuals and not as strange folk who are willfully lost in time. The problem is that just as we're getting to know these characters as people, the movie pulls a veil over them: It loses its nerve and mutates into an only mildly compelling crime drama, albeit one whose protagonist is maybe more tortured than usual.

That's because Sammy Gold is essentially a good boy. He works in his father's fabric shop and hopes to become a rabbi. He also longs to get married, although his faith makes the whole courting ritual more painful than usual: At one point we see him and the girl he's got a crush on sitting several feet apart on a couch, in painful semi-silence, as the girl's parents watch nosily from the hallway. The girl asks how many children he wants. "Five," he answers tentatively; she counters with eight. And this is even before they're allowed to hold hands.

Distraught when the girl's family chooses against him -- his own family's exceedingly modest income appears to be the main problem -- Sammy becomes susceptible to the schemes of a wily neighbor, Yosef (Justin Bartha), a bad-seed Hasid if ever there was one. Not only does Yosef not respect women (he watches soft-core porn at home, leaving the window curtain open so Sammy can sneak a peek from next door); he also works for a drug dealer named Jackie (Danny A. Abeckaser), who has come up with the ingenious idea of using Hassidim to smuggle Ecstasy into the country. Yosef packs Sammy, along with his own younger brother, Leon (Jason Fuchs), off to Amsterdam, where their suitcases are packed with the stuff. (They've been told they're transporting "medicine" for rich people.) When they re-enter the States, customs barely bothers with them. Who could be more innocent than pasty-looking Hasidic youth in rumpled suits?

Holy Rollers, set in the late 1990s, is based on a true story (the script is by Antonio Macia), and you have to hand it to the guy who came up with this scheme in real life. As Eisenberg plays him, Sammy is quintessentially unsuspicious: Eisenberg has made a career out of playing sweet, sexually maladroit kids, and his innocence here practically zooms off the charts -- those payot framing his face sure don't hurt. He has some lovely scenes with Ari Graynor, as Jackie's foxy girlfriend, Rachel, who is, deep in her heart, a nice Jewish girl -- just not nice enough, or Jewish enough, for Sammy. In one flirtatious scene they toy with the idea of running away together: Sammy plays along, but the wounded, lost look in his eyes suggests he's taking it seriously; Rachel wishes she could take it seriously, but she's too much of a pragmatist to do so. Graynor, playing her as a woman who's half tough sexpot and half sweetie pie, makes you feel that weight.

But Holy Rollers, in addition to having an incomprehensible -- and inescapably goyish -- title (Sammy and his cohorts may be somewhat holy, but what, exactly, are they rolling?), ultimately suffers from a lack of conviction. Its ending feels rushed and strangely inconsequential. But at its best, particularly in the beginning as Asch establishes the details of Sammy's family life, the picture is deeply empathetic, sensitive to class issues as well as religious ones. When Sammy and his family sit down to a candlelit Shabbat meal, their almost-shabby dining room really does look like something straight out of the 19th century. Is that setting cozy or merely stifling? For Sammy, it appears to be a little of both: There are obvious benefits to sequestering yourself away from the modern world, but every now and then, you're bound to hear it calling your name. Who could blame anyone for wanting to answer, "Yes, I'm here"?