Concrete, Washington is the setting for this adaptation of Tobias Woolf's memoir, 'This Boy's Life'; and Robert de Niro is the step-dad from hell, a man incapable of standing any competition in any aspect of life. But it's a fairly standard coming-of-age drama, with a vaguely nostalgic air, heavy on the period details. De Niro's character should be either frightening or funny, but in the end comes across as merely pathetic: the eventual realisation of this by the other characters provides the pivot to the story but unfortunately we, the audience, realise this much sooner than they do. Perhaps the problem is that, 45 years ago, behaviour such as his was normal, so today we struggle to relate to it as people would then: we can't understand why the more "heroic" characters tolerate it. But another part of the problem is that the memoir format hampers the story from living in the here and now: we know the author (played here by Leonardo Di Caprio) survived, and became a famous writer to boot, so it's hard to impart a sense of life or death urgency to what we see; the happy ending after the hardship is booked in advance. Finally, the story's eventual resolution seems semi-random: this may have been how it happened, but when the boy wins a school scholarship there's been little before to indicate that this might happen. The result is a dull tale, which is a shame: with a little more immediacy, and a little less comfortable framing, the struggle between de Niro and di Caprio could have been great.