American History X movie review (1998) | Roger Ebert

Indeed the race hatred of the skinheads is mirrored (with different words and haircuts) by the other local ethnic groups. Hostile tribalism is an epidemic here.

The film, written by David McKenna and directed by Tony Kaye, uses black and white to show the recent past, and color to show the 24-hour period after Derek is released from prison. In prison, we learn, Derek underwent a slow transition from a white zealot to a loner–a brutal rape helped speed the process. Meanwhile, young Danny and his friends (including a massive guy named Seth, played by Ethan Suplee) wreck a grocery run by immigrants. At school, Danny is a good student, as Derek was before him; both are taught by a black history teacher named Sweeney (Avery Brooks), who supplies the moral center of the film.

In the immediacy of its moments, in the photography (by Kaye) that makes Venice look like a training ground for the apocalypse, and in the strength of the performances, “American History X” is a well-made film. I kept hoping it would be more–that it would lift off and fly, as it might have with a director like Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese or Spike Lee. But it never quite does. Its underlying structure is too apparent, and there are scenes where we sense the movie hurrying to touch its bases.

One crucially underdeveloped area is Derek’s prison experience. With a swastika tattooed on his chest, he fits in at first with the white power faction, but is disillusioned to find that all the major groups in prison (black, Hispanics, white) have a working agreement; that’s too much cooperation for him. Fine, but is it that, or a crucial basketball game, that gets him into trouble? Not clear.

He’s assigned to the laundry, where his black co-worker (Guy Torry, in a wonderful performance) gradually–well, begins to seem human to him. But there’s a strange imbalance in the conversion process. The movie’s right-wing ideas are clearly articulated by Derek in forceful rhetoric, but are never answered except in weak liberal mumbles (by a Jewish teacher played by Elliott Gould, among others). And then the black laundry worker’s big speech is not about ideas and feelings, but about sex and how much he misses it. There is no effective spokesman for what we might still hopefully describe as American ideals. Well, maybe Derek wouldn’t find one in his circles.