Toby is not so sure. He sees right away that Dwight is as phony as a three-dollar bill - that beneath the posturing and the bluster is a sworn enemy.

• Trailer for Michael Caton-Jones's film starring Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Barkin, Jonah Blechman, Carla Gugino, Eliza Dushku, Chris Cooper, Z.
• Audience Reviews for This Boy's Life Aug 01, 2011 Before the heights of stardom, a young Leonardo DiCaprio built his name with this coming-of-age tale based on the real life memoirs of writer.

Caroline might be able to see that, too, except that she is desperate. After the wedding, the mother and her son move in with Dwight, and the trouble starts.

'This Boy's Life' is based on a memoir by Tobias Wolff, the Toby of the story, who survived Concrete and Dwight and settled his old scores in the pages of his book. It plays like fiction, and yet it has the particular details of a story burned into the memory.

Dwight, for example, doesn't tell people to shut up. He tells them, 'shut your pie-hole!' The expression has a peculiar unpleasantness, and yet in a way it is funny. That would also describe Dwight.

This is a clever book about feeling left out, told from the point of view of a little boy and his pet elephant who doesn’t quite fit in. Written by Lisa Mantchev and illustrated by Taeeun Yoo.

He is played by Robert De Niro, in one of his most distinctive performances. De Niro shows Dwight as a man whose low self-esteem borders on self-contempt, and who tries to cover it by finding fault in everyone around him. He is a verbal bully, a sadist, a liar, an emotional con man.

Caroline, played by Ellen Barkin, perhaps sees her husband clearly enough, but has made a decision early in the marriage: She will not get in between Dwight and Toby. She wants the marriage to survive (although it will never 'work' in any positive sense). She is a bystander in the war. Maybe that works out all right for Toby, who is forced as a consequence to grow up more quickly, to develop confidence in himself, to learn to take a stand.

What keeps Toby going is the conviction that there must be better places than Dwight's house, and better things to do than play a victim. Toby has a brother - separated from him and his mother by the messiness of the divorce - who is a student at Yale. Toby doesn't envy him so much as see him as a possible salvation, a way out of Concrete.

This Boy's Life Summary

Toby is played by Leonardo DiCaprio, a relative newcomer (he's done TV, and had the lead in 'Critters III'). The movie is successful largely because he is a good enough actor to hold his own in his scenes with De Niro, so that the movie remains his story, and isn't upstaged by the loathsome but colorful Dwight.