You can tell when fall has arrived in New York; the last of the air-conditioners come out of the windows, the heat comes on for the first time in six months and both of our city’s baseball teams are absent from the Series. (Can’t say I was excited about the Cardinals’ victory; as Henry Kissinger said of the Iran-Iraq war, “It is a pity that both sides cannot lose.”) Tomorrow we turn the clocks back, hastening the sense that darkness is falling across the land.

Not content with external darkness I went to a matinee of the remarkable — and remarkably painful — film, Half Nelson. There are finally other films in theaters that I want to see, but I had heard great things about Half Nelson and suspected it would be hard to find in the near future. Sure enough, there were four other people at the matinee I attended in the Village — and two of them left before the film was half over.

Ryan Gosling plays an eighth grade public school history teacher in Brooklyn, but that is the least of his character’s problems. He is also a junkie who arrives to class, and the basketball court where he coaches a girls’ team, in a just barely functioning state. Shareeka Epps plays one of his students and best players who knows his secret. She lives by the Red Hook projects and has her own issues: a mother who works constantly, an absent father, a brother in jail for dealing and her brother’s old kingpin who wants her to start working for him…

None of which really does justice to the story. It’s many things beyond that — includiing a surprising indictment of sixties radicalism and the hide-bound public school system — but for anyone who knows addiction it is more painful than a horror film. I saw much of the movie through my fingers, actually saying “No, no,” each time Gosling’s character picked up, each time Epps took a ride with her “friend.” The final scene is as strangely painful and hopeful as any I’ve seen in a movie this year, and recalled for me the children who haunt the great books of Dostoevsky — Crime and Punishment, The Demons, parts of the Brothers K. Their existence, and the existence of innocence itself, is a reminder, a reprimand, an apparition and a goad. When the lights come up, the darkness remains. Don’t see it alone.