Some viewers and critics have worried that Menno Meyjes' Max "humanizes" Adolf Hitler. But the film is less concerned with making Hitler sympathetic, or even very specific, than it is in using him to illustrate a series of ideas. This interest in ideas makes Max rather emotionally flat, an exercise more ideological than dramatic. But this focus, and the imaginative process it entails, make the film notable and intriguing.

Max's Adolf (played by Noah Taylor, without the mustache but with eyes obscured by the familiar shock of hair) is an aspiring 30-year-old painter in Munich, 1918. A veteran of the First World War, he's too poor to live on his own (much like the nation for which he fought), and so still resides at the local Army barracks, doing laundry and odd jobs to get by. The future Fuhrer is here fretful and depressed, searching for moral and social order, a structure he might believe in. As the film opens, he's contemplating whether to devote himself to his painting or to politics. As it tracks his struggle, the movie reveals that this choice is illusory. Adolf, so unhappy, so desperate for approval and a sense of purpose, is the one to find the almost frighteningly perfect language for this insight: "Politics is the new art."

At first glance, the Adolf Hitler in Max hardly seems a rhetorical genius, or even much of a thinker. Wearing his tattered military trench coat, he arrives at an art gallery located in an old ironworks (such repurposing and intersecting of industry and art is a repeated image). The owner, a fictional German-Jewish dealer named Max Rothman (John Cusack), happens also to be a veteran; in fact, he's lost an arm to his four years in service, and so bears his own umbrage. Max recognizes Adolf's uniform and the portfolio he carries, and offers to see his work.

Adolf is distrustful, however, when he hears that Max is fond of "modern" work: His gallery is at that moment showing German expressionist George Grosz (Kevin McKidd), another veteran whose work reveals personal anguish and political resistance in alarming, angry images. Adolf's work is more mundane, vaguely realistic sketches of soldiers in trenches and portraits of dogs. Still, Max encourages him to "go deep," to paint the battlefield as it "felt," rather than as it happened.

Max understands the difficulty of his project, telling Adolf that he's "hard to like," particularly when he lets loose a bit of anti-Semitic invective. Partly, Max makes a project of him to assuage his guilt for coming home to a fine home and intact family, including a lovely shiksa wife (Molly Parker), two children and attentive in-laws. And partly, he does it to rekindle his fading enthusiasm for art as politics. Max's frustrations (he too was a painter before he lost his arm) drive him to drink and take a mistress, a painter named Liselore (Leelee Sobieski). Her sparse, unheated apartment exemplifies her dedication, and makes Max's accumulated clutter look increasingly oppressive: Miniature busts and hand-painted teacups fill all the shelves in his home.

Repeated close-ups of such tchotchkes indicate Max's increasing confusion and desire, and provide a ground for his parallel interest in Adolf. Where Max has learned to repress his anger, or twist it up with cynicism, the young corporal is all raw surface. Taylor plays him with ferrety frowns and twitchy fingers; given the context, the fate of this artist as a young psychotic, the performance seems apt, but its buildup to a ghastly anti-Semitic diatribe before a throng of ready-to-rouse Germans is hardly subtle.

Adolf's other calling, in the film's overly schematic structure, comes embodied by a captain at his barracks, Mayr (Ulrich Thomsen). Just as Max urges him to "go deep," Mayr advocates his seemingly intuitive understanding of surface, of "propaganda." Seeing in the seething young man a voluble public speaker, he arranges for local speeches. When Adolf demurs, saying he wants to pursue his art, Mayr scoffs. "That is your canvas," he whispers in Adolf's ear, looking out on a crowd of sullen faces. Hitler goes to work.

Meyjes' Hitler embodies a set of ongoing tensions, between art and politics, self-expression and performance, ambition and nostalgia. Looking backward, his new sketches for military uniforms, assemblies and structures demonstrate a certain genius for order. It's grandly, crazily aggressive, it's "future kitsch," exults Max, not even imagining the danger in the realization of such a vision.

Max is himself searching for a new sort of meaning amid his remorse and resentment, and believes he finds one in his ability to give hope and public display, as well as a living, to young artists. At first, Max scorns Adolf's claims to connections between art and politics: "Would you rather teach them a new way to see, or how to pay their taxes?" he asks. But seeing and paying taxes are equally functions of desire and projection. Today, the system seems to run on automatic: Speeches are devised for maximum televisual impact, campaigns for office come in 60-second commercial installments, candidates and platforms, even wars, are products. That kitschy vision is fully realized.