When play gets rough at an urban high school basketball game, there's only one thing for the typical movie coach to do - let the soundtrack swell self-righteously, furiously storm the offending ref and shame him into justice with some articulate brow-beating. But when coach Dan Dunn (Ryan Gosling, "The Notebook") explodes at an unfair official, it's with a rambling string of ineffectual expletives. Promptly ejected, Dunn scowls, stomps off and allows himself one last pathetic "so there," weakly chucking a sideline ball at the ref's turned back.

Dan Dunn is not the saintly inner-city teacher he'd like to be. He's unconventional, certainly, slipping street slang into his classroom discussions and joking easily about The Man with his middle school students. But he's not revolutionary - nowhere in "Half Nelson" will you find any sanctimonious speech-making or falsely inspirational uplift. When Dunn confronts Frank (Anthony Mackie, "She Hate Me"), the crack-dealing family friend of a favorite young student, even he doesn't know what grounds he has for accusing the man of being a corrupting influence. Dan, it turns out, is a frequent customer.

A crack addiction makes for a startling take on the clich