Tobias (Leo DiCaprio) is a cocky kid prone to trouble in school, always getting into fights. He likes to be called Jack, not Toby ("He reads all those Jack London books"), and he and his lovely if unfocused mother, Caroline (Ellen Barkin), are always picking up some belongings and running from town to town across America. If there is a bus available to Phoenix or Seattle, either one will do depending on which one leaves sooner. Caroline and Jack end up in Seattle and it is there that she meets Dwight (Robert De Niro), a sharply-dressed former Navy man who works in a Washington town called Concrete (he is also handy with a cigarette lighter). Eventually Jack and Caroline move in to his backwater house where Dwight's other kids live. The adjustment is not easy but slowly we discover that Dwight is a drunk animal - a man who provokes a fight. His reasons are his own and, as played by De Niro, he is often scary, often drunk and pretty much looking for any reason to punch, kick or physically assault Jack. Dwight knows Jack likes to get into trouble yet he mostly hates this kid because Jack loves to read, sing and dance around. De Niro and screenwriter Robert Getchell ("Mommie Dearest," "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore") also tend to show Dwight's clumsiness and how Jack can sometimes one-up his stepfather.
Jack finds himself befriending greasers with ducktail haircuts who want nothing more than to drink and engage in frank sexual talk about girls. He finds solace in a smart kid, Arthur (Jonah Blechman) who is gay, and they both develop a friendship after an awkward muddy fight where Jack insults him. They also share their love of the piano which points to Jack's need to exit Concrete and go to prep school. Easier said than done.
"This Boy's Life" is strong stuff though a little undernourished when it comes to Jack's mother, Caroline, and Dwight's actual children. Caroline is a woman who keeps running away from mostly temperamental men, and drags her son with her to any town where such men don't exist. And yet she keeps ending up with them - wouldn't she have seen what a hotheaded mess Dwight was from the start? As Barkin's Caroline heartbreakingly says at one point, "I don't know what to do." Ellen Barkin makes the character sparkle and come alive yet there is precious little inner life and she's practically cut out of the last half of the movie. Dwight's own children are also left in the dust - you wonder if Dwight had treated them the same way as Jack.
"This Boy's Life" has the requisite 50's rock and roll and doo-wop songs but it has a far more personal, deeply unsettling subtext than most other 1950's-type movies of its ilk. It unveils the violent impulses of a reprehensible man who knows of no other way to discipline Jack. De Niro shows you the darkness and shadowy exterior of such a man, and DiCaprio thrillingly shows the hopeful light at the end of the tunnel for any kid who wants to get away from the clutches of hell. I know that hell all too well.
