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Boys Town Meets Boyz in the 'Hood

"Sleepers," a film of lost innocence and regained cliches, contains all manner of lurid material, yet recalls those corny old Warner Bros. movies about Dead End Kids. Why, there's even a role for Father Flanagan.

Purportedly a serious look at social injustice, the picture is, in fact, an overwrought melodrama about the barbaric abuse of four boys at a New York state reform school in the late '60s.

The story, allegedly a true one based on Lorenzo Carcaterra's bestseller, details the unspeakable cruelties the children endured at the hands of four sadistic guards. While Carcaterra's book has since been denounced as a hoax, the film's narrator (Jason Patric) claims that the story is indeed a true one about "friendship that runs deeper than blood." Patric, who plays Carcaterra, also reveals that two of his chums are dead and that the third has never overcome the horrors of his past.

The narration may be clunky and intrusive, but it puts necessary distance between the audience and the all-too-detailed atrocities that befall the young heroes (authentically acted by Brad Renfro, Geoff Wigdor, Jonathan Tucker and Joe Perrino). It also prepares us for the rapes and beatings that follow director Barry Levinson's nostalgic opening portrait of the boys' childhood in their close-knit, if notorious, New York neighborhood.

Burnished and golden in the July sun, Hell's Kitchen becomes a shabby Oz where frolicking children glisten in the spray from opened hydrants. The four kids, all altar boys, roam the streets with little interference from their families. They can come to little harm under the care of lovable Father Bobby (Bobby De Niro), who dispenses wisdom unto them while shooting hoops or bourbon.

Although they tease the nuns and sneak into the confessional, the kids have never been in any real trouble, until one of their pranks gets wildly out of hand. They are put under the care of the sadistic Nokes (Kevin Bacon) and his equally ruthless colleagues.

Before they are released, the four boys agree not only to keep their experiences to themselves, but to avenge themselves someday. The opportunity comes 15 years later, when two of the friends, now hardened criminals, see Nokes eating dinner in a Hell's Kitchen bar. They gun him down in front of four witnesses and are about to stand trial for murder when another of the four, Michael (Brad Pitt), now a district attorney, comes up with a complicated, preposterous and somewhat muddled plan that might save the day. Dustin Hoffman enlivens the ensuing courtroom scenes with his humorously authentic turn as an alcoholic lawyer who defends the killers.

This is the latest in a rash of successful Hollywood flicks that try to make us feel good about people gunning down defenseless bad people. (In this case, Mr. Nokes was armed only with a sandwich when the youngsters filled him full of lead.)

Didn't Father Flanagan teach us anything?

Sleepers is rated R.