If you have never seen this heartbreaking and fabulous work before Robert de Niro and Brad Pitt, you will have to catch it urgently!
In 1996, a rare power fresco arrived in the cinema: Sleepers. The film, directed by Barry Levinson, is carried by a casting of stars: Robert de Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Brad Pitt, Kevin Bacon, Billy Crudup, Minnie Driver and Jason Patric.
This mixture of judicial drama, revenge and redemption makes the intrigue particularly striking. Barry Levinson tells us a deeply human, tragic and violent story with rare sobriety; The filmmaker is not afraid to confront the spectator with disturbing realities and with heartbreaking moral choices.
A little one was once in America
Like there was once in America in Sergio Leone, the story will follow a group of adolescents, in the mid -1960s. These 4 kids come from the popular district of Hell's Kitchen, in New York. They find themselves incarcerated in a recovery house following a joke that turned into drama.
11 years later, two of them, marked for life, find the sadistic and torturers who martyred them during their detention and cut it coldly. The other two, who became a journalist and substitute for the prosecutor respectively, faithful to the law of Hell's Kitchen, will try everything, with the support of the parish priest of the neighborhood and the mafia godfather, to get them out of there.
The film, overwhelming at will, is taken from the autobiographical novel of the same name written by Lorenzo Carcaterra. But the New York legal community, after doing research, explained that no case resembling this dark story has been identified. For its part, Carcaterra has always refused the debate.
This does not prevent this story from touching the heart, sublimated by the sensitive staging of Barry Levinson and the always just play of the performers. An important part of the film is in a penitentiary establishment for minors. The actors playing the adolescent protagonists deliver a heartbreaking performance, in particular Brad Renfro, a grassy star in full ascent in 2008.
A heartbreaking story
History, evoking sexual assault on adolescents and acts of torture, is very difficult; However, it makes it possible to highlight the abuse of children and denounce pedocrime, as well as the wanderings of justice in the treatment and monitoring of victims.
Sexual abuses on minors in institutions were little discussed in consumer films in the 1990s. Sleepers helped to open a dialogue on this taboo subject, long before many institutional scandals were revealed.

Warner Robert de Niro camps Father Bobby
Vendetta
This is why the story also questions our relationship to revenge, a way followed by some of the protagonists of Sleepers. He also questions relations to faith, thanks to the character's character embodied by Robert de Niro, torn between his thirst for justice and his ecclesiastical vocation. It is undoubtedly one of the best roles of the mythical actor, often forgotten when you talk about your fruitful filmography.
For his part, Kevin Bacon has never been so terrifying and detestable as in the shoes of Sean Nokes, a pedocriminal goalkeeper responsible for sexual crimes within the correction house.
As for Brad Pitt, he slips into the costume of Michael Sullivan adult and delivers a feverish and under tension performance. Note that a teenage character is played by the late Brad Renfro, tragically disappeared in 2008, died of an overdose of heroine at the age of only 25 years.
Sleepers, a little child there was once in America, is available in VOD, DVD and Blu-ray, to get urgently for a pure cinema moment! It is a film that remains in memory for a long time.