French-Arab convict Malik (Tahar Rahim) receives an education behind bars in the Oscar-nominated crime drama A Prophet. (Mongrel Media)

Jacques Audiard, the director of A Prophet (Un prophète), has said he originally considered naming his film after the Bob Dylan song Gotta Serve Somebody. He might just as easily have used the title of another recent picture: An Education.

Like last year's Hunger, A Prophet conflates the prison genre with the art film.

Audiard's audacious prison drama – France's entry in this year's foreign-language Oscar race – is, indeed, about servants and masters. But it's also a maximum-security Bildungsroman, tracing an innocent's getting of wisdom behind bars. In the course of an intense two hours and 30 minutes, the film charts the growth of a young French-Arab convict, from a green kid into a savvy criminal. The education of Malik (Tahar Rahim) starts with a painful tutorial on concealing razor blades in his mouth and progresses to the intricacies of trafficking drugs and staging a mob hit. Along the way, our illiterate antihero also learns to read and write and takes an introductory course in economics at the prison's school.

Audiard's movie could be, in passing, a cynical mockery of the prison system, where the cons call the shots and well-intended attempts at reform only equip them for a better criminal career on the outside. Even putting that aside, the critically acclaimed film – winner of nine prizes, including best picture, at France's César Awards – will trouble some viewers with its ambiguous, at times even sympathetic, treatment of its central character.

When we first meet Malik, we're bound to feel a little sorry for him. A slight, sensitive-looking 19-year-old, with no family to speak of, he seems to have spent the better part of his adolescence in juvenile detention. On his first day in an adult prison, he's beaten by a couple of prisoners who steal his new sneakers. But the deep scars on his back and right cheek, and a brief mention that he's in the stir for attacking a cop, suggest Malik also has a violent side.

The prison is divided between the Corsicans, who wield power, and the Muslims and Arabs like Malik, who occupy a separate cellblock. The head Corsican is César (a superb Niels Arestrup), an aging crime boss who sees an advantage to taking Malik under his wing. Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi), a hostile witness in an upcoming trial, has been temporarily placed in the prison, and César wants him iced before he can take the stand. César coerces Malik into committing the murder. Overcome by nerves, Malik almost fails, turning a simple throat-slashing into a fierce struggle that ends in a geyser of blood.

In return for the killing, César protects Malik and makes him the Corsicans' servant. (There's another word for it in prison.) Needing a go-between with the outside world, César gets Malik to apply for parole, which leads to regular day passes. Away from the prison, Malik uses the cover of a job at an auto-body shop to transact César's business but also to set up a drug-running operation with the help of ex-con Ryad (Adel Bencherif).

As the film moves beyond the prison's grey concrete walls, it becomes faster, more fragmented. Malik's assignments take him to Marseille and Paris. He becomes embroiled in the turf wars and shifting allegiances of gangland. César, who still treats him as a lowly minion, doesn't realize his "Arab dog" has become an independent operator. As most of César's fellow Corsicans are transferred out of the prison under a new law and the number of Muslim prisoners grows, you can see the inevitable power shift coming.

Corsican mafiaso Csar (Niels Arestrup, right) makes Malik a lieutenant in his crime gang in the film A Prophet. (Mongrel Media)

In France, Audiard is a highly regarded writer-director whose handful of previous films includes the offbeat thriller Read My Lips (Sur mes lèvres) and The Beat That My Heart Skipped (De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté), the latter a French remake of James Toback's 1970s cult favourite Fingers. A Prophet, like last year's Hunger, conflates the prison genre with the art film. Audiard mixes stark, brutal realism with dreams and drug hallucinations involving running deer and chanting ghosts. His cinematographer, Stéphane Fontaine, employs narrow point-of-view shots as though we were peeping at the movie through our fingers. It's mostly just arty window dressing. The film's strengths lie in its depiction of the two central characters and their slowly changing dynamic.

With his swept-back silver hair and doleful look, Arestrup's César could be Marlon Brando's Vito Corleone as a Corsican peasant. To Malik, he can be a father figure or shockingly vicious. (There's a torture scene with a hot spoon that's almost as horrifying as the throat-slashing episode.) He struts the yard like an old rooster, but Arestrup lets us see the anxiety behind his tough-guy pose. His César is both a hateful and a profoundly sad figure.

Newcomer Tahar Rahim's slight, beetle-browed Malik begins by being at turns sullen and pathetic, but he has a native intelligence waiting to be developed. When he secretly teaches himself Corsican so he can understand his masters, it's clear he's also got more initiative than César and his cronies give him credit for. He's the apt pupil who'll one day overtake his teacher.

But is Audiard guilty of that old charge, namely, romanticizing criminals? It's hard to argue otherwise when the closing credits feature, without a trace of irony, Jimmie Dale Gilmore's laidback version of Mack the Knife, the classic Brecht-Weill ode to a sexy killer. The film's title, referring to the nickname Malik earns after a moment of foresight, also has an ominous ring. I get the queasy feeling that Malik may become a role model for young Arab men the way Al Pacino's Tony Montana once was for gun-toting hip-hop artists.

In French, with English subtitles.

A Prophet opens in Toronto and Vancouver on March 5.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC News.