You know how it is with films about inspirational teachers: the teachers in question are always cool. Whether they’re sexy, like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds and Sidney Poitier in To Sir, With Love, or as defiantly unorthodox as Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers and Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, they’re larger-than-life in a way that marks them out as Hollywood characters.
The teacher in Brave the Dark is cut from a different cloth. Directed by Damian Harris, and starring his brother Jared Harris, the film tells the true story of Nate (Nicholas Hamilton), a self-destructive teenager who keeps getting into trouble in small-town Pennsylvania in the mid-1980s. Harris plays Stan Deen, the English teacher at Garden Spot high school, who cares enough to help. So far, so conventional. The sweet-natured, quietly radical twist is that Stan is far from cool. He dresses drably. He makes bad jokes. He sings Broadway show tunes to himself. And the closest he gets to delivering a rousing speech is saying “This too shall pass” so often that it gets on Nate’s nerves.
