A powerful and polemic alternative take on our assumptions about the War On Drugs...

SPOILERS...

As far as flawed ideas go, prohibition is up there with “The saucers are coming! Quick, drink this!” in terms of sheer, naked stupidity. That creating an entire criminal underclass and lining the pockets of violent, dangerous people is seen as preferable to having someone enjoy a Gin Fizz speaks volumes about how collectively wrong-headed humans can be.

Humanity, however, does tend to counter idiocy, pain and suffering with art, music and literature. Alcohol prohibition in the United States helped jazz music to spread across the country as speakeasies blossomed, while Tommy-gun-toting gangsters in the mould of Al Capone have become instantly-recognisable archetypes in their own right. The War On Drugs has had a similar effect, showing cinema-goers a world of wrongdoers from lovable wasters Cheech and Chong to the crazy-eyed morally-bankrupt cop played by Nic Cage in Bad Lieutenant.

Director Kevin Asch’s new film, Holy Rollers, offers the audience something entirely different from the relentless grit of Training Day or the red-eyed exercise in time-wasting embodied by Harold and Kumar Get the Munchies, instead showing how both drug abuse and drug prohibition can be equally devastating.

Based on a true story, Holy Rollers tells the tale of Sam Gold (Jessie Eisenberg), a young Hasidic Jew whose frustration with his seemingly inescapable destiny – marry, become a rabbi, remain within the incredibly insular Brooklyn community – eventually leads him into a whirlwind of drugs, sex and all that which shatters his life completely.

The film throws the viewer into the deep end from the off. The first time we meet Sam and his family is in the cramped kitchen of his parents' house; the air is thick with Yiddish, the bustle of family life and good natured teasing. The overall impression is of warmth and comfort, although the sense of 'otherness' cannot be avoided. Unless you are intimately familiar with the intricacies of Yiddish before watching this movie, you will feel like an outsider. Asch uses Yiddish heavily in these opening scenes, immediately giving the impression of insularity, of a culture happy to exist with minimal interference from the outside world. It is against this backdrop of suspicion of the “goyim” that the tragedies of the film unfold.

While taking out the rubbish on a Saturday afternoon (undertaken with great stealth and worry over being caught: it is strongly implied that at this point, the greatest transgression in Sam's life is breaking the Sabbath to empty the bins) Sam encounters his neighbour's brother, Yosef (Justin Bartha). Yosef is crude, loud and wears bright white sneakers, a stark contrast to the sombre black sported by all those seen so far. Learning of Sam's desire to earn enough money to be a viable husband, Yosef offers Sam the job of transporting medicine from Amsterdam into the US.

Sam and his neighbour Leon (Jason Fuchs) decide to go along with this scheme, both blissfully ignorant of the chemical properties of the medicine that they're carrying. They travel to Europe, Sam lying to his parents as he does so, before returning with the goods. Both are horrified to learn that they've been used to ferry MDMA and a fracture forms in the friendship of Sam and Leon.

Tempted by the fabulous money to be made in transporting the ecstasy tablets, Sam is drawn back to Yosef and becomes pulled into the criminal underworld. As Sam becomes close to the Brooklyn-based gangster Jackie (Danny Abeckaser) he slowly breaks his family ties and loses his identity in the process. This is cleverly mirrored in the transition made by Yosef, who is seen wearing less strict clothes, drinking, cavorting with women and eventually cutting his long sideburns (transgressing the Biblical imperative to not shave the side of the face), leaving the audience feeling like Cassandra, seeing the path that Sam's life could take but being powerless to change a thing.

The temptations offered inevitably become too much for Sam to bear; he gets more and more involved with the running of drugs, gaining status and power but losing a vital part of his humanity. After recruiting other Hasidic Jews into his schemes, the entire operation falls apart. Under the guidance of the thuggish suppliers, the ecstasy is cut with PCP, heroin and a whole catalogue of other drugs in order to bulk out the product and increase profits. These impurities are detected by police sniffer-dogs at customs and Sam's house of cards collapses to nothing.

Holy Rollers is relentless in its portrayal of drug culture in the 90s. There are moments of high glamour and pure, unadulterated sex as beautiful women in clubs dilate their pupils and lose their inhibitions, but these are juxtaposed with unforgiving scenes of sickness, comedowns and violent gun-toting gangsters. As well as showing the damage to the body, the depiction of the damage done to the family is heart-breaking. Sam becomes ostracised from his parents, loses his friends and his future, before finally abandoning his upbringing, shaving his sideburns and dressing like a street-smart young thug. The powerful symbolism invoked in the cutting of Sam's sideburns give a stronger emotional punch than a thousand gunned-down innocents in even the smartest of action flicks, while the scene where Sam is approached in the street by a fellow Jew and offered the Tefillin to pray (a set of leather boxes containing excerpts from the Torah and connected by leather straps which are wrapped around the arms) mirrors a heroin addict's hungry application of a tourniquet so closely as to be breathtaking.

These impeccably observed moments take Holy Rollers from being a simple cautionary tale into something unmissable. Rather then being a basic film cataloguing the horrors of drug use, it raises questions on the validity of prohibition itself. While the ecstasy taken and transported throughout the course of the film is doubtless a source of woe, the vicious and money-hungry criminal gangs involved in its creation, movement and sale are shown as having far more detrimental effects than a small, white tablet ever could.

After watching the film, I left the cinema feeling isolated, alone and estranged. Holy Rollers is a powerful and unrelenting piece of film which offers something unusual, upsetting and absolutely unmissable.

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