About two months ago I rounded up all the films I was looking forward to seeing, but that list largely consisted of reasonably high-profile names for which the buzz is often noticeable many months before the release. But I don’t just limit myself to films I’ve heard about, though; sometimes I’ll pick a film at random and hope for the best. It’s worked out well in the past — Angel-A, Black Book and Perfume were all films I took a chance on, and all turned out to be great.

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints wasn’t one I’d heard of, and I only discovered it thanks to seeing a poster on the London Underground. I found out from that that Robert Downey Jr. was starring, and as I believe him to be generally incomparable I figured I’d give it a look. And it’s excellent.

Guide is autobiographical, written and directed by Dito Montiel who grew up in Queens during the ’80s but left as he saw his friends turning to violence and drugs, only returning — after becoming a successful author in California — when he finds that his father is sick and refuses to go to hospital.

So, pretty standard coming-of-age stuff, of the variety you’ll probably have seen before in films like Stand by Me. There’s a lot that makes Guide stand out, though. While the entire cast never misses a note, with supporting actors — Rosario Dawson, Dianne Wiest, Melonie Diaz, Eleonore Hendricks and Julia Garro to name just a few — being just as believable and watchable as the main players, there are some superb performances on show here. Robert Downey Jr. plays the adult Dito — and is, as I said before, incomparable — but Shia LaBeouf as the young version has even more of the bottled-up anger and frustration the elder Dito still has. Equally, Channing Tatum and Chazz Palminteri are electrifying as Dito’s over-muscled and violent friend Antonio and Dito’s father.

The film switches from present day to 1986 and back again throughout, and even though we know how things pan out — the elder Dito tells us most of the story right at the beginning — it doesn’t matter, with the absence of any solid continuity, along with the natural, almost directionless style of directing making the film feel that much more fresh and exciting. The soundtrack is also packed with guilty pleasures from the ’80s, alongside more respectable rock and roll from the likes of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground.

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is short, sharp, and considering this is Montiel’s first piece of direction, it’s all the more impressive. It’s already out on DVD in the US and has just been released in the UK, so try and see it — you won’t regret it.