Dead Man on Campus James Schamus’s Indignation is the best Philip Roth film adaptation by a mile.

PHILIP ROTH'S 2008 novel Indignation opens with lines from e.e. cummings’s “i sing of Olaf glad and big,” which celebrates a conscientious objector who refuses to go to war: “Olaf (upon what were once knees)/does almost ceaselessly repeat/ ‘there is some shit I will not eat.’” Marcus Messner, the Newark-raised hero of Roth’s novel and James Schamus’s intense new film, takes a similarly valiant stand against coprophagy. As one of the few Jewish freshmen in the class of 1955 at (the fictional) Wines burg College in Ohio, Marcus (Logan Lerman) strives to throw off the weight of multiple patriarchs: his crazily overprotective father (Danny Burstein), a kosher butcher; the school’s censorious dean (Tracy Letts); and, perhaps, God Himself. This is the stuff of most coming-of-age sagas, comic and tragic, and Roth, of course, made his name with the former. Indignation is on the other end. In the film’s prologue, our rebel takes a bayonet in the stomach in Korea—and ruminates in voice-over on how a nice Jewish boy could have made such catastrophic choices.