When you look at the credits for “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints,” you could potentially see the name Dito Montiel four times, depending on if it’s the opening or closing credits. It isn’t uncommon to see someone’s name listed in the credits this many times for a movie. But what makes it special in the case of this film is that it is based on a book Montiel wrote. Montiel adapted and wrote the screenplay. Montiel directed the film. Topping it all off, Montiel is the main character.

It’s no wonder that the film, for the most part, feels like an inside joke. And like an inside joke, if you are on the outside of it, it just doesn’t make you feel good at all. I’m sure that Montiel feels the film is great, and those that know him and understand what happens on screen feel the film is great. Heck, those who can relate to the film will probably enjoy it too. But, for someone who cannot relate to the film the least bit, it essentially becomes a piece that is only interesting because of the actors and not really the story being told.

The film starts out with an older-looking version of Dito Montiel, played by Robert Downey Jr. As he promotes his new book, he is informed that his father is deathly ill. A normal person would drop everything, but as we begin to see through flashbacks, Montiel’s teen years were nowhere near normal, ultimately ending with a huge fight between him and his father.

What the fight was about isn’t revealed until the end, and ultimately, that’s one of three reasons to continue watching the movie, the other two reasons being the leading men’s performances. It’s debatable whether Downey is really stretching as an actor or just playing a version of his real-life self, but either way, he is captivating. And Shia LaBeouf is extraordinary in his first major dramatic role.

The scenes that involve Downey are the only ones that seem sincere. It’s unfortunate that all the scenes involving LaBeouf are not engaging, but everything that is shown through flashbacks is something that some other movie has shown – and has likely executed with 10 times the skill. We see how Montiel’s teen years were rough, as some of his best friends died or were arrested, and how he disobeyed a loving father every chance he got, ultimately causing the tension to build with each scene of dialogue.

When the film is finally resolved, and the mystery of why Montiel and his father fought is revealed, the disappointing payoff is almost to be expected. The film works as a “Robert Downey Jr. plays an older version of Shia LaBeouf” kind of thing, but what a story like this demands, or should demand at least, is that the ability to look past the actors that are playing the characters and see them as who they are playing. But with the material being scatterbrained and unmoving, to say the least, nothing much comes out of the film except possibly being the audition tape that shows the reasons LaBeouf was cast in “Transformers” and in the upcoming “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”

Rating: 2 of 5 stars