American History X

American History X is a 1998 American crime drama film directed by Tony Kaye and written by David McKenna. The film stars Edward Norton and Edward Furlong as two brothers from Los Angeles who are involved in the white power skinhead and neo-Nazi movements. The older brother (Norton) serves three years in prison for voluntary manslaughter, and is rehabilitated during this time, and then tries to prevent his brother (Furlong) from being indoctrinated further. The supporting cast includes Fairuza Balk, Stacy Keach, Elliott Gould, Avery Brooks, Ethan Suplee and Beverly D'Angelo.

McKenna wrote the script based on his own childhood and experiences of growing up in San Diego. He then sold the script to New Line Cinema, which was impressed by the writing. American History X was Kaye's first directorial role in a feature film. Budgeted at $20 million, filming took place in 1997. Before the film's release, Kaye and the film studio were in disagreements about the final cut of the film. The final version was longer than Kaye intended, which resulted in him publicly disowning the film; this negatively affected his directing career.

Plot
When high school student Danny Vinyard writes a positive book report on Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, school principal Dr. Bob Sweeney sets up a remedial class named "American History X" and tells Danny to write a paper about the life of his elder brother, Derek Vinyard, who was one of the leaders of a local Neo-Nazi group until he was jailed for killing two black men who were trying to steal his truck. Not long after, Derek is released from prison, and turns out to have recanted on his Nazism during his time inside. Danny is still keen on becoming a Neo-Nazi himself, but Derek is determined to stop Danny making the same mistakes.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) Great performances from the entire cast, particularly Edward Norton, who was nominated for an Oscar for his performance as Derek.
 * 2) Many of the characters are memorable and well-written. In particular, Derek and his fellow Neo-Nazi leader Cameron are depicted as people whose views are clearly wrong, but also are written and acted as being charismatic enough that you can understand why people would follow them.
 * 3) The flashbacks use black-and-white cinematography, which is not only a handy way of quickly identifying which sequences are meant to be in the past and present of the story, but a clever metaphor for the way Derek and his fellow Neo-Nazis see the world.
 * 4) Instead of the Neo-Nazis being written as just being inherently evil, many of them are shown to be once-decent people driven to supporting the ideology by injustices in their lives, and/or people who are trying to solve local problems while not realizing they're actually creating even more problems in the process.
 * 5) * Related to this, Derek is shown as someone who took his father's casual racism to extremes after his father was shot dead by drug dealers, ultimately leading to him taking it to such extremes that he ends up accusing the prison's Aryan Brotherhood group of being not racist enough, causing them to violently turn on him.
 * 6) Shows that any racial group will always have good and bad people in it, and that inciting hatred against another race doesn't solve anything.
 * 7) Doesn't shy away from showing the issues facing working-class, inner-city Americans at the time, and many of those issues are still very relevant today.
 * 8) While Dr. Sweeney is mostly shown as the voice of reason, he admits to Derek after the latter is assaulted by the Aryan Brotherhood that he himself was once racist against white people and even did prison time himself as a young man, before turning his life around and getting two doctorates, sending a positive message both to Derek and the audience.
 * 9) Derek's character arc, with him turning into an ever more extreme racist, then finally recanting his views, and helping his brother avoid making the same mistakes, is a good one.
 * 10) Powerful, tragic ending.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) Some of the scenes can be quite disturbing, especially the scene of Derek killing the would-be truck thief by curb-stomping him, and the scene of Derek being raped in the prison shower by the Aryan Brotherhood members.
 * 2) Some of the neo-Nazi characters were played by actors who have ancestry from groups that are targets by such like Edward Furlong (who has Mexican ancestry) and Fairuza Balk (who claims to have partial Romani and Native American ancestry).
 * 3) It seems a little implausible that Derek would have escaped from his curb-stomping the thief with only a voluntary manslaughter conviction and three years in prison, considering how the police caught him only about a minute or so after the fact (even if they do try to handwave it by saying Danny, who was the only witness, refused to testify against Derek).
 * 4) A flashback late in the movie shows Derek's late father arguing that affirmative action can be counter-productive and students shouldn't always take everything their teachers tell them at face value, which may come across as being very valid to some viewers. However, instead of letting viewers decide for themselves whether Derek's father has a point, the movie takes the cheap move of having him casually use the N-word in an attempt to discredit everything he's saying.
 * 5) * This was even more unnecessary considering that earlier in the conversation Derek's father claimed that Dr. Sweeney was only hired because of his race, despite not even having known who Sweeney was until Derek mentioned him earlier in the conversation, which was a much subtler way of hinting that Derek's father was giving him bad advice.

Trivia

 * Director Tony Kaye disowned the movie, after New Line rejected his idea to reshoot most of it in favor of releasing the existing footage in an edit put together by Edward Norton. Kaye demanded to be credited as "Humpty Dumpty", but when the Director's Guild told him that "Alan Smithee" was the only pseudonym he was allowed to use, he instead took out adverts in Variety that attacked Norton and New Line Cinema. It's believed that the controversy over the incident likely cost Norton that year's Oscar for Best Actor, which was instead won by Roberto Benigni.