Lymelife Movie Review

FRUSTRATED teens, the roar of the railroad, killer ticks and Alec Baldwin: pretty much the way I've always seen Long Island.

A native, Derick Martini, sees it that way too, directing and co-writing (with his brother, Steve) a movie that gathers up a mass of their homeland and shapes it into something like art. "Lymelife," set amid marital decay and teen frustration, isn't quite the "American Beauty" of the 516 area code, but it'll do.

That's when Scott Bartlett (Rory Culkin), a shaggy 15-year-old, gets caught between playing with his "Star Wars" laser gun and the smile of his schoolmate (Emma Roberts, in her first R-rated part).

His real estate developer dad (Alec Baldwin) boasts that he's almost a millionaire, but his wife (Jill Hennessy) wishes the family still lived in Queens. For some reason, an older son (Kieran Culkin) is in the military and expecting to be called for the Falkland Islands war, which didn't start until three years later.

The developer's star employee (Cynthia Nixon, unconvincingly laying on the Lawn Guyland accent) is locked in an unhappy marriage with her husband, an unemployed fellow with unwashed hair and a deer rifle. I think this may be the first screen character I've encountered who's being driven into a psychotic haze by Lyme disease, and I give Timothy Hutton credit for investing the character with a full dose of creepiness.

Baldwin, who made this project happen by agreeing to shoot it while also doing "30 Rock" in the city, keeps his character balanced with obnoxious charm. No one could do better delivering this line, which the dad hurls up at his sulking son while the latter takes refuge on the roof: "Please come down here before f - - - ing Carvel closes."

The movie is more a setting with characters than a story, and its "Mean Streets" touches have been imitated in so many other films that they've come to seem pre-packaged. We don't need another scene in which a girl enters a room in slo-mo to the strains of a Motown song -- but the sequence works, and Martin Scorsese has blessed this project by taking an executive producer credit.

Martini brews a hazy feeling out of memory and time, a sense of relief and regret in the knowledge that nothing so exotic as ordinary suburban puberty can ever happen to you again.