MOVIE REVIEW : A Powerfully Complex ‘Boy’s Life’ : Told with remarkable sensitivity, this story of one particular and painful coming of age manages to touch us all.

“This Boy’s Life” is every boy’s life, every child’s nightmare. Told with unblinking truthfulness and remarkable sensitivity, its true story of one particular and painful coming of age manages to touch us all, underlining the notion that nothing we do in our lives is anywhere near as difficult as just plain growing up.

While maudlin, whiny tales of adolescent difficulties are one of the curses of today’s Hollywood, the power and frankness of this exceptional film is something else again. But as much as being based on Tobias Wolff’s spare and moving memoir of the same name, “This Boy’s Life” (AMC Century 14) has the advantage of having fallen into the hands of a creative team that has managed to transfer the reality and emotional heft of the printed page onto the screen.

Cleanly and feelingly written by Robert Getchell (Oscar-nominated for “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” and “Bound for Glory”) and directed with great care by Michael Caton-Jones, “This Boy’s Life” is equally fortunate in its acting. The ensemble work of Ellen Barkin, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro is expressive without overdoing it and almost hypnotic in its honesty.

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Though 18-year-old DiCaprio (a veteran of TV’s “Growing Pains”) will get a lot of justifiable attention for his finely nuanced work as a teen-ager trapped in an inner and outer storm, it is De Niro’s shattering performance as stepfather Dwight Hansen that is the film’s core.

As complex a character as he’s ever played, De Niro’s Dwight is a taut piece of work that will disturb and fascinate audiences as much as the real Dwight, an enigmatic and frightening figure, shook up those whose lives he dominated.

However, when Toby (DiCaprio) and mother Caroline (Barkin) first appear, scuttling across the 1957 Southwest in a shaky white and yellow Nash as Frank Sinatra sings “Let’s Get Away From It All” on the soundtrack, Dwight has yet to make his presence felt.

Instead Caroline, the type of person who solves problems by leaving them behind, is headed for what she is sure will be a new life among the instant riches of the uranium fields of Utah. Buoyant, high-spirited and divorced from Toby’s father, Caroline (acutely played by Barkin) is also a woman with more courage than common sense.

Worse, she is a woman with abysmal taste in men, and this particular trip was caused by a desire to flee from a boring and mean blue-collar lout named Roy. A similar spur-of-the-moment burst of high hopes then causes her to grab Toby and impulsively head out for Seattle and yet another stab at the good life. Not that the boy minded. “I was caught up,” he says in a literate, persuasive voice-over that echoes the book’s tone, “in the delight of my mother’s freedom.”

If Caroline is problematic as a mother, Toby is a disaster as a teen-age son. A prankster, liar and sneak thief who regularly cuts school, cracks wise and demands that everybody call him the more masculine-sounding Jack, Toby’s rootless scorn is more than anything else a plea for attention from a kid who is afraid of the sensitivity that lies beneath his own bravado. Wanting to change but feeling helpless to do so, Toby is clearly a candidate for a little parental discipline. What he gets instead is Dwight.

Caroline’s most persistent Seattle suitor, auto mechanic Dwight is an easy target for the wised-up Toby to mock. With his Bronco Nagurski brushcut, laughably elaborate way of lighting a cigarette and artificial jack o’lantern smile, Dwight appears to be a harmless dope, a comic relief Mr. Square who lives near the nowhere town of Concrete with three children from a previous marriage. What possible lure could this drone have for his dazzling firefly mother?

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Part of his appeal, it turns out, is Dwight’s belief that he can straighten Toby/Jack out, eliminate his discipline problems root and branch. Her emotional resources exhausted, Caroline is willing to let him try, setting the stage for one of the most wrenching intergenerational confrontations since Raymond Massey turned on James Dean in “East of Eden.”

For while it is clear to everyone except perhaps Caroline that the superpolite Dwight who brings flowers and helps her on with her coat is a facade, no one, least of all Toby, is at all prepared for exactly who he turns out to be.

Humorless, angry, with a formidable “I don’t make the rules” self-righteousness, Dwight is a relentless bully and needler who announces the reversal in Toby’s fortunes in no uncertain terms. “Don’t pull that hotshot stuff on me,” he challenges the boy. “You’re in for a change, you’re in for a whole ‘nother ball game. Oh yeah.”

Yet to say all this about Dwight is to make him less complex than he is, to really not understand what makes him so unnerving. Knowingly written by Getchell and brilliantly played by De Niro, Dwight is that all too realistic sadist who thinks he is the one being abused, the warped disciplinarian who truly believes that all the harsh things he is doing are both underappreciated and for Toby’s good. The fact that Toby himself begins by feeling that maybe he does need some straightening out only makes the dynamic between them unfold in ways that are that much more twisted and destructive.

The job of integrating all these combustible elements falls in the unlikely lap of director Mark Caton-Jones, whose last two films (“Memphis Belle” and “Doc Hollywood”) were marked by a sentimentality that would be out of place here.

Yet something in this story appears to have touched Caton-Jones, to have brought back the strength of “Scandal,” his directing debut, for he responds beautifully to the challenges of the material. He has made the film (rated R for strong language and sexuality) all of a piece, making sure that the three lead performances complement rather than overwhelm each other. And he has avoided (despite an emphatic Hollywood ending that departs from the book) either condescending to the situation or downplaying its harrowing aspects. “This Boy’s Life” doesn’t flinch, and its conflicts will disturb your dreams as it does those of the boy who lived them once upon a time.

‘This Boy’s Life’ Robert De Niro: Dwight Ellen Barkin: Caroline Leonardo DiCaprio: Toby Jonah Blechman: Arthur Gayle

An Art Linson production, released by Warner Bros. Pictures. Director Michael Caton-Jones. Producer Art Linson. Executive producers Peter Guber, Jon Peters. Screenplay Robert Getchell, based on the book by Tobias Wolff. Cinematographer David Watkin. Editor Jim Clark. Costumes Richard Hornung. Music Carter Burwell. Production design Stephen J. Lineweaver. Art director Sandy Cochrane. Set decorator Jim Erickson. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (strong language and sexuality).