Aspiring to be “Dangerous Minds” as rewritten by Albert Camus, the New York City public school drama “Detachment” quickly gets stuck in its own world-weariness.
Adrien Brody creates a sensitive portrayal of a substitute teacher at the kind of high school where students, when asked to contribute in class, threaten to beat up the teachers. The frazzled staff and administrators (played by Marcia Gay Harden, Tim Blake Nelson, James Caan, Lucy Liu, Blythe Danner and Christina Hendricks) respond with cynicism and exasperation. Somewhere along the line our hero tries to reform a teen prostitute (Sami Gayle) whom he invites to move in with him.
With its troubled existential hero, its shouty speeches, its jumpy editing and animated interludes, “Detachment” has everything you’d expect in a student film, but it’s instead the product of a grizzled 60-year-old veteran, “American History X” director Tony Kaye. His dedication to the material is admirable, but his tactic of following one dismal development with an even more depressing one comes to seem monotonous and pointless.