Dito Montiel grew up in Brooklyn, one of the kids in the 1980s in New York City, full of talent but pressured to conform to the low expectations of the neighbourhood. School was a drag. Clashing with gangs, graffiti gangs, was taken for granted. Sexual experimentation, sometimes brazen, sometimes tentative, was expected. Life was hanging-out. If you had a good family, you were lucky, but there was a culture of violence, especially from fathers.

His novel of the same name and this film are autobiographical although Montiel stresses that the Dito of the fiction is fiction. Be that as it may, he captures the rough and never-ready lives of his friends in those days, the saints he is guiding us to recognise, their waywardness, their language, their pressures, the sudden irruptions of violence and the need for some to get away.

Shia LaBeouf (Holes, Bobby) plays the teenage Dito with sensitivity. The middle-aged Dito is Robert Downey Jr who brings intensity and anguish to the adult who has avoided his family, especially his father, for fifteen years while attaining celebrity in California. The friends are well cast with Channing Tatum as the ultimately tragic figure who cannot escape the brutality of his own father, his brother’s violent death in a prank in the subway, despite the support of Dito’s father and mother. Amongst the girls, Rosario Dawson gives another sympathetic performance as the adult woman whose life turned out so drably and not as she might have imagined it.

Chazz Palminteri is very good as Dito’s father who is kind to the kids in the neighbourhood. We see him as loving his son. However, Dito does not see this and they have a terrible falling out. When he returns as an adult, his father is ill and he has to deal with how he handles meeting him again, his resentments from the past and the possibility of some kind of forgiveness and reconciliation. His mother is played with feeling by Dianne Weist.

While this is a film that is firmly set in a particular time and place and captures the feelings of people in this environment, it is able to move to more universal understanding of human nature.

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