This Boy's Life.

A true story. Whenever those words appear in a movie's ad or in its opening credits, they function as both appeal and defiance. Appeal: the events and characters you are about to see are as real as you are. Therefore they should concern you. Defiance: as incredible as the following story may seem, it did happen. We swear it. Truth is stranger than fiction.

And This Boy's Life is indeed "a true story," just as its opening credits state. Or, at least, it's based on a memoir by one of our most brilliant fiction writers, Tobias Wolff, and he certainly makes the events of his remembered childhood ring about what happened when his divorced mother, fearing that the improvised, roaming existence she was leading with her son was turning him delinquent, married a man of unquenchable meanness and occasional brutality. The memoir's multifariousness is part of the book's truth. We read about young Tobias (or Jack, as he likes to be called) in his solitude and in the company of kids and adults. We are privy to his dreams of adventure, his lust for older girls, his petty thievery, his attempts to understand his much-loved but slightly dotty mother and to cope with his obnoxious yet pathetic stepfather. The action shifts from schoolrooms to country roads to boarding houses to the imagined places of a bookworm's fantasies. Jack deals with many people in many ways and is treated by them as variously. Years pass in the book, attitudes change, and no relationship is set in stone. This Boy's Life is truly a life.

None of the above is meant to shrivel the adaptation by means of invidious comparison, but as a qualification of what the moviemakers have done. The film is good and has its own peculiar excitements. But does it stand by itself or does it drive you back to its source in order to get a truly clear view of a life? I think the latter.

This film doesn't feel like a life but like a horror story. Of course, real lives do contain horrors but the word "contain" makes my point: horrors are contained, slightly mitigated or dulled by the flux of everyday life. (Extreme horrors like concentration camp experiences or episodes of torture, draw their particular awfulness from, among other things, the obliteration of life's variety.) The worst events in the book are just as miserable as what's shown on screen, but they are embedded in a larger life that is endurable, sometimes agreeable. Of course, screenwriter Robert Getchell and director Michael Caton-Jones are far too skilled and sensible to hurl one scene of abuse after another at us. They vary their movie's mood with scenes of humor and idyllicism: Jack goofing off on the piano with a pal, walks through town and rides around the Washington state countryside while plotting one's entrance into adulthood. But these less intense passages are like the scenes in war movies in which soldiers in foxholes exchange wisecracks between rounds of mortar fire.

Here the mortar fire is coming from Robert De Niro and you can see why he got the job. The stepfather, Dwight, is both a brute and a geek. De Niro's most famous characterization, Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, was the most searing portrait of male savagery in decades. But his Rupert Pumkin in The King of Comedy was a masterpiece in quite another vein: a comic portrait of a loser of monstrous proportions. If La Motta made you shudder, then Pumkin made you laugh, then shudder. As Dwight, De Niro combines La Motta and Rupert but achieves a third character completely different from the predecessors. Dwight - Lawrence Welk fan, would-be Great Hunter thoroughly bested by his wife at a turkey shoot, proud coiner of such witticisms as "You can call me anything you want but don't call me late for dinner" - is like a walking compendium of everything in the 1950s that was tasteless and fatuous. And the fatuousness underpins the man's brutality. This Dwight, who preens in front of a mirror in his new scoutmaster's uniform while letting his stepson flounder in a suit several sizes too big, may be a joke but he's clearly insensitive enough for the greater cruelties to come. We laugh but all too soon we will cringe.

And all too often, perhaps. The marriage lasted for years. Why? Both the book and the movie clearly show that the mother initially was sacrificing herself in order to give the boy a father and a respectable middle-class existence. But since hostility broke out so soon between the two males with most of the blame clearly attached to Dwight, and since Jack soon seemed headed again for delinquency, very much because of his new family situation, why didn't this spunky, even footloose woman take her son and get out? Ellen Barkin's juiciness and wit, both as an actress and physical presence, only make the question nag. There's no satisfactory answer in the movie. If you need one, it's in the book and it's completely believable.

Monsters spend a relatively small part of their waking lives being monstrous. The book's Dwight is just as repellent as De Niro's when he's being repellent. But most of the time he does what most of us do: goes about his business and leisure and is perfectly innocuous while doing so. Moreover, in scenes such as the one in which stepfather and boy go on a painting binge in the living room, or the one in which the two unite with the rest of the family to fend off the smarmy suitor of the daughter of the house, it becomes clear to the reader that a sort of bond did occasionally form between the antagonists. Life is like this: routine, familiarity, boredom, common foes, all contribute toward making the intolerable tolerable; and thus do four years of incompatibility pass. But you won't understand this by watching the movie. You will instead feel, from time to time, like screaming at Elien Barkin, "Good God, woman, pack your bags!" By removing the rationale of dailiness from the story, the moviemakers have changed well-rounded characters into a monster and his victims and have turned This Boy's Life into Raging Stepfather.

Robert Getchell's dialogue is idiomatic and taut, and this writer knows how to begin a scene on a deceptive note of calm before making it gradually mount to violence. Caton-Jones's direction aims for the gut and lands, repeatedly. David Watkin's cinematography makes the Washington state landscapes not postcard-beautiful but resonant with the spaciousness and freedom that Jack so sorely desires. De Niro and Barkin deliver the emotional goods and Leonardo Di Carpio, as Jack, is more than promising: he illuminates what is already complex in the boy's character and foreshadows the greater complexity of the man who will someday tell this story. (But it was a mistake to have Di Caprio read the narration on the soundtrack. The voice should have been that of an older man looking back on his youth.)

Good movie? Good horror movie. A "true story"? Not true enough. This movie doesn't have the multifariousness of life.