Bloodbrothers is a screen adaptation of Richard Price's hard-hitting 1973 novel about a nineteen-year-old Bronx youth's coming of age. Stony De Coco (Richard Gere) is torn between loyalty to his family and flight. His father Tommy (Tony Lo Bianco) is a construction worker who dreams of the day when he and Stony will work together as De Coco and Son. But the youth has other ideas. For a while he finds fulfillment working as a hospital aide taking care of kids. In one of the movies' many magical moments, he entrances them with a spiffy story aimed at showing the children their self-worth.
Stony needs someone to give him direction and support. His girlfriend (Kristine DeBell) jilts him and he dates Annette (Marilu Henner), a disco waitress who backs up his decision to rebel against Tommy's macho tradition of boozing and womanizing. Stony's problems at home are further complicated by his mother (Lelia Goldoni), a borderline psychotic who takes out her frustrations on Albert (Michael Hershwe), eventually driving him to anorexia.
Robert Mulliganz (To Kill a Mockingbird, Summer of '42) is an old hand at naturalism and his direction of this gritty film with its surface violence and crude language is quite masterful. Stony's eventual alimentation from his father is made all the more painful because Tommy, at times, is so likeable. His sentimentality is evident in two key scenes. In the first, he and his brother Chubby (Paul Sorvino) throw a surprise birthday party for the paraplegic owner (Kenneth McMillan) of a pub they frequent. They give him an electric powered chair. And in another touching moment, Tommy takes his family for a drive that ends up at the cemetery. There over the plots he has purchased, he poetizes about De Coco solidarity.
In the end, Stony must set out on his own path. His father's self-centeredness and brutal manipulation of those he loves is too much for the sensitive youth to handle. In a gesture of tenderness and pure-heartedness, Stony brings his psychological scarred brother Albert along with him. This salutary and touching finale makes Bloodbrothers stick in the mind as a tribute to the feminine side of a boy who becomes a man through an act of love.