The Main Actor

This has something of the same hard-edged documentary authenticity as Hauff's earlier Brutalisation of Franz Blum, though a tone of autobiographical self-flagellation adds a slightly mawkish element. A teenage boy and his brutal father act in a film about their no-hope lives; at the end of the shooting, the boy runs away to the anguished middle class director, who unsuccessfully tries to help him start a new life. Hauff, it seems, actually had this experience with a non-professional actor whom he used in an earlier film. The movie doesn't get very deep beneath the skin of its wayward adolescent protagonist, but it registers as a thoroughly competent (if somewhat crude) example of second division New German Cinema.