‘Sleepers’ is an ironic name for a movie which leaves its audience feeling anything but rested. The book defines the colloquial term ‘sleepers,’ and the movie’s narrator explains the term, but it is still an eerie play on words for a movie about the nightmarish experiences of four young boys.’Sleepers’ is based on the book of the same title by Lorenzo Carcaterra. Where Carcaterra has words, writer/director Barry Levinson uses narration to relay important information to the audience.’This is a true story about friendship that runs deeper than blood,’ the narrator begins. The four boys, Lorenzo (Jason Patric) the narrator, Michael (Brad Pitt), Tommy(Billy Crudup) and John (Ron Eldard), are growing up in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen during the mid 1960s. Home is ‘a place of innocence run by corruption,’ Lorenzo says. We see them play stick ball, pull pranks and lay out on tenement roof tops, etching out a childhood amid domestic violence and poverty. Levinson pulls some of the funniest and most endearing scenes from the book so his audience can fall in love with his harmless New York waifs. Levinson also, for some inexplicable reason, adds a few scenes of his own. Anyone who has read the book will find the additions forced and out of place. The boys have three adult friends in their world; a priest, a mobster and a shopkeeper. If this sounds like the beginning of a joke, it’s not. Part of Hell’s Kitchen’s charm is its ability to take care of its own and these stand-in fathers do just fine. One summer, a seemingly harmless prank goes terribly wrong and the four friends find themselves being sent to Wilkinson Home for Boys. What happens to them there will forever scar their lives and lead them, as adults, to seek their own brand of justice – street justice.’Street’s only one matters,’ Fat Man ( the shopkeeper) says. My biggest concern going into this movie was how Levinson would handle the abuse which changes these boys. To his credit, Levinson sticks mainly to the book, and believe me, Carcaterra’s book needs no embellishment. Levinson makes use of dramatic lighting to handle some of the more horrific scenes. There are times when the use of light coming through stained glass and loud moody music is a little heavy handed, but one scene which had potential for melodrama comes across clearly yet heart-wrenching. Lorenzo sits in an isolation cell, bloody and bruised after being battered in a guard vs. inmate football game. He is surrounded by filth, rats and darkness, except for one thin beam of sunlight coming through a small crack. Lorenzo sticks his hand in the path of the light and stares at it as it illuminates his hand. In the illuminated light Lorenzo sees home and the childhood he has already lost.There truly isn’t a bad performance in this film. If a fault lies in the movie, it’s in Levinson’s inability to give us the full characters of the children before they lose their innocence. The movie treats the four boys almost as one character, but in the book you get a chance to see each child as a distinctive person and this makes what happens to them all the more chilling.