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What helps make the film so unforgettable is how much we wrestle with our feelings – ethical, sexual, religious if we're religious or not and, just, how we feel about our hero. We don't buy their happy ending... And yet, we don't have to buy it. I feel like it works even with the weird, tacked on ending because questions linger as father and daughter walk back to their car, ready to return to downhome Grand Rapids.

Scott's father figure breaks painfully and earnestly, in a stellar series of cuts and camera positions, reinforcing the power of film to show us the disquieting howls of an unforgiving world, through the complicated mechanics of artifice. This is a film about discomfort and loneliness (something that would become trademark for Schrader) in which its characters just simply want to belong, to be a part of something, anything, resembling any notion of a comforting reality.

The disjointed relationship that men have with pornography lies at the heart of Hardcore, Paul Schrader's film about a man's journey down the elicit rabbit hole of the sex industry. With a pulsing soundtrack and a riveting performance by George C. Scott, the film tackles the struggles of masculinity in an age of redefining sexual norms.

Schrader's exploration of the sacred and profane, the puritanical and pornographic, holds interest, harkening back to the concerns of Taxi Driver (which he wrote) and pointing the way forward to the moodier, more stylized hot mess of American Gigolo (which he wrote and directed). The cavernous, neon-lit interiors Jake ventures into speak of emptiness and exploitation, as well as danger. But odd flashes of humor leaven the ghoul-chamber horrors.

The action meanders around to a hackneyed end, and because Hardcore is softcore, it doesn't convincingly convey that climate of self-hatred which pervades the sexual ghetto.

"Hardcore" never gives in to the rhythm of its nighttime world, never swoons; Mr. Schrader doesn't seem capable of the perversely rhapsodic style his subject demands. But he does work with speed and intelligence, paying sharp attention to detail and making the movie as funny as it is quick and frightening.

The movie's ending is a mess, a combination of cheap thrills, a chase, and a shoot-out, as if Schrader wasn't quite sure how to escape from the depths he found... But "Hardcore", flawed and uneven, contains moments of pure revelation.