Adrien Brody stars as Henry Barthes, a substitute teacher drifting from school to school, deliberately avoiding lasting connections, whose latest assignment at a crumbling public high school forces him into unwanted intimacy with troubled students, burned-out colleagues and a teenage runaway he takes in against his better judgment. Director Tony Kaye, working from a script by former teacher Carl Lund, adopts a fragmented, unsentimental style — including direct-to-camera interviews and animated interludes — to portray the exhaustion and quiet despair of an underfunded public education system. Marcia Gay Harden, James Caan and Christina Hendricks round out an ensemble of educators pushed past their limits. The film's bleak, unflinching tone drew comparisons to a documentary as much as conventional drama, prizing atmosphere and accumulated dread over conventional plotting.