A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints

Writer/director Dito Montiel’s autobiographical film A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (based on his book of the same name) is a bittersweet bit of nostalgic storytelling. It juxtaposes the past and present by giving the past a decidedly warmer and more sincere feel. It also uses a surreal style that keeps the past obscured in a way that replicates real human recollection. Some dialogue gets lost or duplicated here and there. Other times there’s nothing but disorienting flashes of images to be seen.

Robert Downey Jr. stars as contemporary Dito reflecting on his experiences growing up in Queens during the1980s as he returns home to visit his seriously ill father (the amazingly intense Chazz Palminteri). Dito (played in the memory sequences by Shia LaBeouf) had a fairly reckless childhood and many of his decisions haunt him as he prepares to once again confront his family and friends.

There’s an aggressive authenticity to the scenes set in 80s Queens where Dito and his ragtag bunch of friends get into gang wars over graffiti and girls. Many of the young characters succumb to tragic circumstances in a truly brutal recounting of the lives of kids in a bad neighborhood. It’s these tragedies of his young life which lead Dito to flee to California and abandon his past.

Most of the film’s flaws appear in the contemporary scenes. While the sequences set in the past are resonant and softly sentimental, the present day material tends to come across as melodramatic and too blatantly emotional. Much of the film’s remarkable nuance seems lost here. Yet, the contemporary story is such a great framework for the movie that I can forgive it for being a little too obvious.

This is a nicely directed, smartly written debut for Montiel. It’s such a precise and harrowing tale that one cannot help but be shaken by the very real and very disturbing occurrences in young Dito’s life. It’s a perfectly honest story that gets to the heart of very simple tragedies.

Grade: A-