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A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints

Review By: Damaris Olivo
DamarisOlivo@TheCinemaSource.com

“My name’s Dito. And I’m gonna leave everybody in this film.”

And so starts the powerful film adaptation of the memoir by Dito Montiel, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, about an adolescent who abandoned everyone and everything he knew, in search of a different life. At first, many people thought this to be a vanity project (Montiel writing, directing, and casting a film based on the book he wrote about his own life?). When one really thinks about it though, who better to tell the story than the man who lived it?

Slapping a film with the phrase “based on true events” is almost like a get out of jail free card, due to the fact that it could be the most horrible film on the planet, but I’ll still sit through it if the events are not as exciting as they should be for a film, but still interesting enough to have really occurred to someone. Fortunately, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints did not have this problem, as it actually could stand alone as nothing but a film.

Dito Montiel (Robert Downey Jr.) is basking in the success of his new book “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints,” when he receives distraught phone calls from his mother Flori (Dianne Wiest) and his old friends supplicating that he return home after 20 years of absence. Dito is then forced to revisit his difficult adolescence and to confront the old ghosts of his youth.

It’s the hot muggy summer of 1986 (although there’s 70’s music blasting in the background, but we’ll let that one go), and a young Dito Montiel (Shia LaBeouf) and his friends are kicking it in the streets of Astoria, Queens. His muscular, streetwise, and perpetually bruised best friend, Antonio (Channing Tatum) is immediately identified as the leader of the group; Antonio’s troubled brother Giuseppe (Adam Scarimbolo) spends most of his time drunk; and Nerf (Peter Anthony Tambakis), is the runt of the group who strives to fit in and stay on everyone’s good side.

The boys run around the city annoying subway booth workers and train conductors, who seem to be used to the teens’ disrespectful ways. They hang out with girls, get into fights (eventually the boys get themselves at odds with a Latino gang called the Reapers, who have a penchant for vandalism, and eventually threaten Dito’s life), and always end up at Dito’s house telling his dad, Monty (Chazz Palminteri), all about their misadventures. Monty, who obviously loves when the kids come over, has a distinct affinity to Antonio, who he knows the teens respect- a fact that isn’t lost on Dito, who we sometimes feel would rather have a dad who is a father and not his friend. His escape from his crazy life is ...