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'Sleepers': Rude Awakening

Two tough guys walk into a bar.

No, this isn’t a bad joke. It’s the central deed in "Sleepers," Barry Levinson’s engrossing tale of four pals and their deadly acts of vengeance.

Anyway, these guys walk into this bar in the Hell’s Kitchen section of Manhattan. It’s 1981—15 years after their release from an upstate reform school. Sitting at a table, eating dinner, is a former school guard who repeatedly beat and raped them. The guys recognize him, sit down with him, introduce themselves and shoot him to death. They’re arrested and brought to trial.

Now for a more peculiar twist: The assistant D.A. who prosecutes the killers is a boyhood buddy who went to reform school with them and was abused by the same guard. This prosecutor has talked his way onto the case and intends to slyly botch it, aided by a journalist chum who was also victimized by the guard. Implausible, you say? Several critics reached that same conclusion about the 1995 book "Sleepers," published as nonfiction by Lorenzo Carcaterra.

Carcaterra, the journalist character in "Sleepers," has stood his ground. He has insisted that the basic yarn is true even though he changed key details to protect his friends.

To see the movie is to forget the whole fact-versus-fiction issue.

Levinson, helped by a very good cast, manipulates us so skillfully that, by the time those toughs (Ron Eldard and Billy Crudup) enter the bar, we’re practically panting for an act of vengeance. The sadistic guard, Sean Nokes (Kevin Bacon), has earned a ferocious comeuppance.

Nokes’s murder occurs halfway through the film. By this time we’ve seen the four pals as happy, mischievous adolescents in the summers of ’66 and ’67. We’ve met their two heroes—King Benny (Vittorio Gassman), a local mob boss, and Father Bobby (Robert De Niro), a street tough turned priest who gently nudges the kids in the direction of lawfulness and hope. We’ve witnessed the unfortunate prank that earned the kids lengthy stints in reform school. ("Sleepers" are youngsters locked up for nine months or longer.)

And, of course, we’ve been made heartsick by the repeated assaults on the boys, committed by Nokes and three other guards. Thankfully, Levinson portrays almost all of the sexual violence by artful suggestion rather than direct observation. But the beatings, fairly graphic, do evoke winces.

If the movie’s first act feels like a darker "Diner," the second act feels like something out of the Grisham oeuvre. It features a pleasing mix of good-guy gumshoeing, smart-alecky dialogue and courtroom surprises.

Following the murder, the grown-up Carcaterra character (Jason Patric), a New York Daily News reporter, looks up his old friend Michael (Brad Pitt), an assistant district attorney. It’s clear their reform-school horrors continue to haunt them: Neither man has been able to find spiritual peace or a permanent mate; and neither quibbles with the idea of conspiring to free Nokes’s murderers.

Toward the trial’s end, the conspirators resort to some really clumsy tricks to bring off their scheme. In at least a few places, "Sleepers" could have used Grisham’s masterly touch. But for the most part, Levinson tells the story—fiction or nonfiction—quite well.

SLEEPERS (R) — Contains graphic beatings, suggested sexual assaults, three shootings and foul language.