Jonathan 's guide , and the narrator of the film , is his Eastern funhouse-mirror-image , a young man from Odessa named -LRB- or , as he would say , '' dubbed '' -RRB- Alex . Played by Eugene Hutz , a musician of Gypsy descent who left Ukraine at the age of 14 , Alex is as besotted by the post-cold-war American present as Jonathan is haunted by the Ukrainian wartime past .