It's typical of Bailleul, the realistic yet pathetic provincial French town of this film, that the local hard-nut gang have to play chicken while bombing around not on supercharged mean machines but on sputtering mopeds.
As the title suggests, it follows a young man on a path to martyrdom but Freddy (Douche), epileptic son of a pub landlady, is anything but divine. He starts out as a likeable enough sort who plays with his friends in the French equivalent of a Boys' Brigade band and spends most of his spare time screwing his checkout girl steady Marie (Courcel). But, as the seasons turn, Freddy gets an unflattering semi-skinhead haircut, takes to wandering about shirtless to show off his tattoos and scrawn, fails to do anything about getting a job, and lands in increasingly unpleasant scrapes with his equally good-for-nothing dead end headed tearaway mates.
When the lads get a stern talking-to for humiliating a chubby majorette, Marie dumps Freddy and starts seeing Kader (Chatouf), an Arab boy, and Freddy boils over into an ending so horribly predictable that it is conveyed through a few scant, enigmatic scenes. Director-writer Bruno Dumont takes a cool, distanced look at his blank central character - Freddy doesn't even seem especially racist - and always places him in the flat, empty, nowheresville landscapes of the depressed and depressing region. There's a very French physicality (a girl on a bidet, a few frames of technical hardcore sex, an old lady in the bath), but the glumness prevents it from being titillating.