The film is about a teenager (Asa Butterfield), a pregnant girl (Healy Steinfeld) and Emile Hirsch of the band Rock. These two people decided to experiment alternative by forming their own alternative family in the CBGB era. Now, everyone in Park Square faces more riots in New York's East Village in the 1980s.
The film shows all the earmarks of a story too heavily compressed; the complications among the entwined families pile up after a while, and the period milieu feels arbitrary.
For a movie with extremely loud punk-rock music at its core, "Ten Thousand Saints" is a pleasantly low-key experience; it's a small-scale character drama about learning to live with loss.
Ethan Hawke is so funny in Ten Thousand Saints that he nearly keeps the movie afloat.
Michael Sragow
August 13, 2015
"Ten Thousand Saints" pulsates with full-blooded supporting characters who create a tragic-absurd tapestry of decay and rebellion in the Ronald Reagan years, from depressed New England to volatile New York. It's too bad the center cannot hold.
The cinematography by Ben Kutchins works more from grime than grim, capturing a battered backdrop for the characters rather than a cartoon battlefield of drugs and crime/
The emotionally uneven film is more intriguing in parts than as a whole, with the periphery characters often more compelling than the somewhat passive protagonist.
