A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints – Review

As a Hollywood writer Dito Montiel (Downey) returns to his Queens borough home due to his sick father, flashbacks of his childhood (LaBeouf) in the mid-80s tell the tale of challenges growing up. The script pulls together drama, both past and present, delivering a final product focused on examining the human condition.

The story itself is mostly a focused drama on both family and friend relationships, and the life-long reverberations of decisions. While it remains a cause-and-effect behavioral study, it is able to explore quite a range of complex emotion though its time-jumping between elder and younger Dito.

This autobiographical coming of age drama is not my usual taste, however I found that this one balances many themes well while being stacked with a great cast. The atmosphere and music help mold a cohesive product, albeit the overall theme and story wind up a tad wandering by the end.

For me, the characters all had a natural realism to their actions and words, as the growing children navigate streets rife with close-knit neighborhood drama. Writer/Director Montiel puts his own life in the middle of the project; however, the end result does not feel like a vanity project.