Before this thunderbolt comes to him, however, Adolph flails about, looking for a way to express himself. And so, as Max opens, he is contemplating whether to devote himself to his painting or to politics. As it tracks his struggle, however, the movie reveals that this choice is illusory. Ironically, perhaps, it is Adolph, so unhappy, so desperate for approval and a sense of purpose, who finds the alarmingly precise language for this insight: "Politics is the new art."

At first glance, the Adolph 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 theme in the film). 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 against the state that is signing away its people’s socio-economic future to the "peace." Max recognizes Adolph’s uniform and the portfolio he carries, and offers to see his work.

Adolph is initially put off 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. Hitler’s work is more mundane, vaguely realistic sketches of soldiers in trenches and portraits of dogs. He hews to this aesthetic, seeing less figurative work as incomprehensible "trash." But Max, captivated by Hitler’s sad story of poverty and loss, decides to encourage his new acquaintance.

Urges Adolph to "go deep," to paint the battlefield as it "felt," rather than as it happened, Max plainly understands the difficulty of his own project. He brusquely tells Adolph that he’s "hard to like," particularly when he lets loose a bit of anti-Semitic invective. In part, Max is drawn to Adolph out of his own sense of guilt, for coming home to a fine home and intact family, including a lovely wife (Molly Parker), two children, and attentive in-laws. He also "believes" in Adolph in an effort to rekindle his fading enthusiasm for art as politics.

Max is grappling with his own frustrations; he too was a painter before he lost his arm. Aside from his perverse interest in Adolph, he takes up drink and a mistress, a painter named Liselore (Leelee Sobieski). Her sparse, unheated apartment exemplifies her dedication, and makes Max’s accumulated clutter look increasingly oppressive. At her place, they cling to one another in her bed for warmth; at his home, miniature busts and hand-painted teacups fill all the shelves, the camera looking through these pieces in order to peer down on Max and his gathered family.

Repeatedly, the camera pans over Grosz’s vivid canvases, then, in a next scene, picks up the details of these little domestic tchotchkes — the visual contrast hints at Max’s increasing confusion, the ground for his investment in Adolph, also churning with contradictions, and even more visibly. 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 build-up to a ghastly anti-Semitic diatribe before a throng of ready-to-rouse Germans is hardly subtle.

Related Sites
Here’s the film’s official site. Read more reviews of Max at Rotten Tomatoes.