1951. Marcus Messner, a brilliant working-class Jewish boy from New Jersey, joins a small, conservative college in Ohio on scholarship. But once there, Marcus’s growing infatuation with his classmate Olivia Hutton and his clashes with the college’s imposing Dean put his plans to the ultimate test.

Famed for his collaboration with Ang Lee, writer-producer James Schamus mines the elegiac darkness of Philip Roth’s late-career novel in his directorial debut. Tempering his matinee-idol looks with a dose of melancholy, Logan Lerman impresses as a 1950s college student struck by cruel turns of fate.