Dito Montiel, a successful author, receives a call from his long-suffering mother, asking him to return home and visit his ailing father. There he finds redemption by facing the 'saints' who have influenced his life.
Montiel's honey coated Queens of the mid-'80s is rich with the violence and carnality of teenagers, and the performances of LaBeouf (as the young Dito) and Channing Tatum (as his Stanley Kowalski-like grunt friend, Antonio) are raw pleasures.
Time Out
February 28, 2007
The plot itself might not break much new ground, but the telling, by both cast and crew, makes this a memoir to remember.
Superb performances and a gripping retrospective plotline make this tough cookie an entertaining one, even if its adult story strand is weighed down with vagaries.
Like an O'Neill play, its virtues are not in well-constructed ideas but in the emotional catharses it wrings out of its audience.
BrandonFibbs.com
February 28, 2008
It is its very autobiographical roots that make Saints an emotional wallop, a raw, authentic work that is, at its defiant core, violently and unrestrainedly alive.
The movie never answers the question of why, exactly, the audience should care about these characters.
Denver Post
October 27, 2006
Though A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is not a great movie, I prefer its street-grit version of adolescent desperation to the arch, mannered tone of Running With Scissors.
It positively crackles with energy, featuring startlingly raw performances from a cast that also includes Shia LaBeouf as the young Dito. And if it looks ragged around the edges, that's as it should be.
Dito Montiel adapts his autobiographical 2001 novel into a vivid slice-of-life drama from the Jim Carroll school of disaffected coming-of-age New York journalism.
Given all the filmed memory pieces about screaming, violent Italian-American families in New York boroughs, I'm not especially thrilled by even a well-made example.
