Based “with huge liberties” on actual characters with names changed, as well as on combinations and composites of people and “a million different (real and imagined)” stories, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is ex-punk rocker and model Dito Montiel's feature directorial and screenwriting début, distilled from his memoir of that title. Robert Downey, Jr. had considered the 2003 book for his own first effort behind the camera, but other projects intervened, and he wound up instead with a rôle in this film developed over four years with the help of two editors and a workshop stint at Sundance.

Low-budget shooting on location in the writer-director’s childhood Italian-Greek Astoria, Queens, cinematographer Eric Gautier captures the streaked graffiti-ed low-rise urban neighborhood of a summer twenty years ago. And, Montiel’s obsession with discovering and casting unknowns finally shelved, the mixed cast of veterans and up-and-comers does well by the first-generation lower middle class not yet feeling the hard push of other ethnic and racial groups or the mass influx of drugs.

A mood period piece for the most part, the film is less successful in developing and justifying its framing parallel story in the present day. “A fictional character despite sharing a name with its creator,” Dito (Downey) is a recognized LA writer who receives a voice massage from his mother Flaurie (Dianne Wiest) that his estranged father (Chazz Palminteri, as Monty) is doing badly, that she has asked two childhood friends to call him as well, and that it would be nice if he came home after fifteen years to mend fences and help hospitalize his dad.

Picked up from JFK by wistful unsuccessful Nerf (Scott Campbell), he decides to stay with that friend and his overbearing mother before gathering courage to confront his own parents, his own ghosts, and the neighborhood and now-grown pals -- the “saints”--of adolescence. Some have gone and some remain; some are in prison and some dead. With occasional brief returns to this present, the bulk of the film is the memories that play out in these bittersweet old stomping grounds. Indeed, until final consecutive minutes in the now of 2005, the short flashes forward to today’s fashionable cultured West Coast writer are more annoying interruptions than not.

In addition, although memory reveals a know-it-all quick-to-anger older father aggressively desirous to be a buddy, the causes given for the estrangement -- Monty’s overriding concern for violent disturbed young Antonio (Channing Tatum) and his resentment when the son dares leave home to bus to California -- are not sufficiently developed as explanations.

But although the naturally presented names of young Dito’s (Shia LaBeouf) street posse and enemies are difficult to keep straight -- a narrative break where four actually introduce themselves comes late and is distracting -- and the pliant girls and frequent obscenities may be outside the experience of some mature viewers, there is an honesty in the emotions of the youthful protagonists that coheres in evoking time and place. Dito rides the El train to Coney Island with new Scottish friend Mike O’Shea (Martin Compston), with whom he walks dogs for gay Frank (Anthony De Sando) and plans to form a band and try luck in California, and there is awed talk of Manhattan across the river, but the film does not leave the hood.

Dito runs around with Antonio and his doomed brother Giuseppe (Adam Scarimbolo), pint-sized Nerf (Peter Tambakis), Mike, and three girls, including his own love, Laurie (Melonie Diaz), who wants to accompany him west -- what used to be called “good kids,” sometimes troubled, growing up too soon, but easy and likeable. Then there is Reaper (Michael Rivera), a dark crazed graffitist bent on revenging a perceived insult, so, both casual and planned, nasty violence brings things to a head, wedges are driven, punishments distributed, and life-changing decisions taken, breaking up that old gang of mine.

Rebuffed by his proud father and about to crumble, the returned adult Dito is tongue-lashed to reality -- and a foreseeable ending -- by surprisingly sensible single mother Laurie (Rosario Dawson). The child as father to the man, the persistence of memory, the confronting of and coming to terms with one’s past, all old themes, yet the evocation of mood and of a turning point in adolescence, are nicely managed by the young cast and the production as a whole.

(Released by First Look Media and rated “R” for pervasive language, some violence, sexuality and drug use.)