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Cast: Shia LaBeouf (Young Dito), Robert Downey Jr. (Dito), Chazz Palminteri (Monty), Diane West (Flori), Channing Tatum (Young Antonio), Melonie Diaz (Young Laurie), Rosario Dawson (Laurie), Martin Compston (Mike)
Written and Directed by: Dito Montiel
Release date: October 2006
Based on the book ‘A guide to recognizing your saints’ by Dito Montiel

The coming of age story is staple diet for indie flicks. Young kid growing up in tough neighborhood, escaping, being successful..and finally returning after decades to find everything and everyone changed and yet staying the same. Punk-rocker Dito Montiel directing from a screenplay based on his own book, covers familiar ground but does it well. He has made this movie into an intensely personal homage to his adolescent years. Watching this movie is like watching a couple of old friends reminiscing over a few beers. To a rocking 80s soundtrack. However Dito does not present not a romanticized, sanitized version of his memories. These memoirs reek of urgency and anguish. As Robert Downey Jr. mentions at the outset itself, quite a few of the characters we meet during the course of the movie would be dead by the end.

The movie begins with Dito, a successful writer now, receiving the news that his father is sick and dying. He sets out on a flight home and starts looking back at his youth.In the flashback, we see young Dito spending his days walking around the Queens streets and smoking dope with Antonio, his younger brother Guiseppe and Nerf. Antonio is always bruised and battered. Thanks to his father. He believes he is a piece of shit and does his best to live up to it. By smashing objects in his way, beating up people and being an asshole in general. Channing Tatum is so compelling in the role, that he makes the audience realize soon enough that Antonio is damaged and he himself knows it.

Dito’s mother Flori is worried about the company her son keeps. But his father Monty is nonchalant about it. Monty has lived his entire life in the locality. And he doesn’t see any reason why Dito can’t do the same. He is proud of his origins. He loves his son. But he doesn’t care to listen to him or to anyone in fact. And the one thing he can’t do is to let his son go off…. At school Dito gets friendly with Mike, a new student from Ireland. Mike dreams of having a music band. Together, they go off on trips across the city. They plan to go to California on the $39 bus ride. Then there are the girls. Melonie Diaz is achingly vulnerable as Laurie, Dito’s girlfriend.

Tragedy strikes. Dito runs away from home. Now that he is back in the neighborhood, he finds that most of his friends didn’t have his good luck. They have mostly ended up on the low end of the totem pole of life. His shoulders droop with the guilt of having turned his back on the people who meant everything to him. But then flight had been his only route to liberation at that time.

Robert Downey Jr. is one of the unsung greats of his generation. Even in a small role such as this, the complexity of conflicted turmoil he can convey through a mere gesture of his hands is unmatched. That is not to take away anything from the sincere performance by the talented Shia LaBeouf.

Stylisitically, the director indulges himself by using a variety of techniques…hand-held cameras, overlapping edits, jump cuts, characters talking directly into the camera. Probably, he went marginally overboard with all that. But Dito Montiel has a story to tell here and it is a story bristling with raw energy…and some indelible home truths.