Paul Schrader’s First Reformed is a searing portrait of alienation and loneliness in Trump’s America. It’s intense, intelligent and bleak and Hawke’s performance compares very favourably with DeNiro’s in Schrader’s masterpieces of societal breakdown in the seventies (Taxi Driver and Raging Bull). Hope and despair are constantly in tension, Hawke’s Rev Tolliver argues, as they are omnipresent and co dependent qualities of the human condition, and Tolliver (and we) experiences a great deal of despair. He’s very much a mouthpiece for an America that has lost its way - happy on the surface but dying of cancer. Telling the story through the tensions and corruptions plaguing American Christianity is a bold move. Tolliver is preaching in a barely attended nothing church in Nowheresville USA. Told almost entirely in flashback, we see him isolated and alone, drinking heavily, but is asked by parishioner Amanda Seyfried to counsel her radical environmentalist husband, and he eloquently articulates a hope he clearly only barely believes in. A patriotic man, he’s lost, following the death of his son in Iraq and the breakdown of his marriage. Philip Ettinger’s Michael is all despair, opposed to the birth of his child into a world of ego, greed and environmental collapse. The stakes rise before their second encounter, as Seyfried discovers a suicide vest, which priest and parishioner dutifully remove, without shopping husband Michael to the authorities. Michael blows his head off minutes ahead of his second meeting with Tolliver, and the latter’s mental health falls off a cliff. He realises not only that Michael’s environmental fears were justified, but the church (or more rightly the mega church) he’s affiliated with is complicit in that greed. Schrader and Hawke show us how thin hope can be and how seductive despair, particularly given the many justifications for it. In an America where politics are paid for by corrupt industrialists how can faith survive and what room is there for love, compassion and care for the planet? Despite Hawke’s monumental performance the film isn’t perfect, as beautifully as it’s shot. Hawke has said the non ending is designed to be provocative and I found it annoying. For all Tolliver’s protestations about having to act, and having neither suicided privately or suicide bombed we have him kissing Seyfried with barbed wire wrapped around his torso before the film abruptly just stops. Overly artistic allegorical nonsense like that winds me up and left me wondering futilely about what Schrader was really saying about his priest and his country. Even contemporary America isn’t without hope?