A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints

This vanity project projects sufficient humility to be watchable, if not a must-see. First-time writer-director Dito Montiel adapts his own memoir of growing up in Astoria, Queens in the 1980s, a prescription for self-importance, but enlists Robert Downey Jr. and Shia LeBeouf to play his older and younger selves, and Dianne Wiest and Chazz Palminteri for his parents, with Martin Compson (of Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen) as one of a variety of believable street boys and girls, another of whom grows up very believably and rivetingly to be Rosario Dawson. So across the board the acting trumps the ego involved, and with big assists from cinematographer and editor, plus Sundance workshopping, this film is able for its duration to make you forget its descent from Mean Streets and all its progeny, and lose yourself in a time and a place and a group of people hanging out and hooking up, getting by and coming to grief. (2006, dvd, n.) *6+* (MC-67.)