Black Irish Reviews

Writer-director-producer Brad Gann's tale of growing up in blue-collar South Boston features a strong central performance, but it doesn't miss a cliche of hardscrabble adolescence. Fifteen-year-old Catholic schoolboy Cole McKay (Michael Angarano) is trapped in an insular neighborhood where family and ethnic ties are everything. His father (Brendan Gleeson) is a hard, unemployed drunk and his mother, pious social worker Margaret (Melissa Leo), is rigid, embittered and dedicated to maintaining the fiction that the McKays are a close-knit, happy, God-fearing family, despite her rebellious daughter's (Emily VanCamp) out-of-wedlock pregnancy and the fact that her older son, Terry (Tom Guiry), is well on his way to being a career criminal. Altar boy Cole is the apple of her eye, but he'd rather be a baseball player than a priest. That said, Cole is responsible, a good student and the film's underage Job: By the time it's through with him, he's survived immersion in the hurlyburly of public school, botching his first date by accidentally killing the girl's pet bird, getting lured into petty crime by his black-sheep brother, seeing his father humiliated by a common thug, and much, much more — even Cole's pets are grist for the misery mill. The uniformly strong cast helps offset some of the screenplay's more melodramatic elements, but not all — the tsunami of Sturm und Drang sweeps away what could have been an affecting coming-of-age story.