Who's in It: Michael Angarano, Brendan Gleeson, Melissa Leo, Tom Guiry, Emily VanCamp
The Basics: A high school kid (Angarano), growing up in a messed-up Catholic family, tries to maintain his inner altar boy while everything else around him goes to hell. His sister's knocked up, his brother's a thug, and just when things couldn't get worse, they get worse. So it's like that.
What's the Deal? This is a really mixed bag. On one hand, you have the dorky pileup of bad thing after bad thing happening to these people, so much so that you wonder when they have time to just sit around and do nothing like normal people. And that's the kind of soap-opera mentality I'm not really down with in films that pretend to be "keeping it real." But then there's the really gentle, thoughtful way the characters are treated during all this upheaval. It wants to be smarter than it's able to pull off, but you have to give it credit for trying.
Seriously, Enough With All the Traumatic Life Events: OK, a list: teen pregnancy, youthful violence and crime, terminal illness, car accidents, armed robberies and on and on. It almost feels like the writer/director Brad Gann has created a parody of a melodrama.
What (and Who)'s Good: It's got nice, observational stuff going on about how "good" kids behave, and really, just about everyone in the cast is on point, which is another odd thing, because usually when you have this much incident taking place, it makes the actors start going nuts and hamming it up. Someday, you'll catch it on cable, and you'll think it's not so bad.
Where You've Seen the Main Kid Before: He played Sean Hayes' son on Will & Grace.