Based on Tobias Wolff's memoir of his middle-to-late teen years, from the late Fifties to Sixty, during which period his footloose single mother settled down and remarried an auto mechanic in the ominously named small town of Concrete, Wa. (Wedding-night revelation: "You can get it doggy style or laying on your side. Those are your only choices.") The new stepfather proves to be the perfect antonym of the Perfect Parent: zealously, jealously determined that his stepson should have no better life than he had. The documentation of this has the authority of indelible memory: the household idioms still ringing in the ears ("Shut your pie-hole!"), the childhood humiliations never fully healed (the rock-and-roller's double-tread hairdo shorn to a military crewcut; the secondhand and oversized Boy Scout uniform; the slippery street shoes on the school basketball court for want of a proper pair of sneakers). Nor does memory seem to fail or gloss over or go on the defensive in Wolff's candid and unvarnished self-portrait: an experimental liar, cusser, smoker, and hell-raiser who is nevertheless subject to repentant pledges to "be better"; a willing conformist who is not uncritical of his fellows nor incapable of independent thought; a latent liberal hiding inside a would-be snob hiding inside a backwater rube. All in all, a complex character. And as incarnated by Leonardo DiCaprio, with his Bowery Boy scowl and his insomniac's eye-bags, he wins our sympathy while never begging and grovelling for it. Robert De Niro as the Wicked Stepfather, to give him the appropriate mythical label, is something else again. His very familiarity works against his performance, his known features distorted and frozen into a set of manic-depressive (more often depressive than manic) masks: eyeless, toothless grin and lemon-sucking or ammonia-smelling frown: village idiot and Grand Guignol monster. Of course De Niro has always been an actor who cultivates difference rather than sameness, but the pothole or series of potholes that lurks in that particular path is the tendency of his latest difference, whatever it might be, to evoke a response of wonderment, delight, mirth -- especially mirth. In this case, an alien and alienating response. And director Michael Caton-Jones, who really ought to have blown the whistle on him now and again, allows De Niro to clear spaces for himself like a rebounder throwing elbows. The hero's mother (Ellen Barkin) and his stepsiblings are prone to fade from view and consciousness altogether: evidence of memory gaps, after all. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd