Ethan Hawke and Asa Butterfield (Screen Media Films)

It’s maudlin and unrealistic. The 1980s soundtrack features indie rock chestnuts from REM and the Replacements that have little to do with the straight-edge hardcore subplot. It even has an epilogue that seems to be in favor of New York’s hyper gentrification. There’s a lot wrong with Ten Thousand Saints, from the directing team of Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini (American Splendor), but I forgive it because most of the actors carry the movie’s awkward melodrama and because it’s a reminder of an East Village that’s quickly disappearing.

In a prelude, we meet young Jude (Henry Keleman) and his errant dad Les (Ethan Hawke), whose wife kicks him out after it turns out he knocked up a neighbor. Les spends a cold Vermont night outside in the greenhouse, and Jude, overhearing his parents’ turmoil, climbs down from his bedroom window to investigate. Dad essentially says good luck and I won’t see you in the morning. Go Ethan!

Years later, Jude (Asa Butterfield), now high school age, hangs out and gets high with his best friend Teddy (Avan Jogia). Les, now living in New York, sends his girlfriend’s daughter Eliza (Hailee Steinfeld) to visit. Jude has an instant crush on this sophisticated big city dame, and when the boys take her to a local party and she disappears with Teddy, he gets jealous. But after tragedy strikes, Jude goes to New York to stay with his dad and find Teddy’s straight-edge brother Johnny (Emile Hirsch). Eliza is pregnant with Teddy’s child, so Johnny takes a shine to her and volunteers to be whatever she needs him to be and it’s another teen love triangle all over again.

When Jude joins Johnny’s straight-edge band, the movie threatens to turn into a musical melodrama, but thanks to its inappropriate soundtrack (and Hirsch, who’s an even less convincing hardcore musician than Butterfield), that doesn’t work either. What stands out is the teen love triangle, and almost impossibly, that sort of works. Hawke’s thoroughly convincing bad dad (“I’m not judging—I met your mother at an orgy”) grounds the dysfunctional family dynamic, and if Butterfield’s character is underdrawn, he and Steinfeld make their growing pains (if not their musical dreams) credible enough that you want to see them turn out alright.

It helps that the melodrama is set in the volatile Alphabet City of the 1980s. The producers do a good job of replicating the area’s run-down look, though the script hits one of its clunkier notes when it incorporates a police conflict with squatters that erupted at Tompkins Square Park in 1989. Still, even if you never thought the Yaffa Café mural was a work of art, anyone who’s walked down St. Marks over the years will get a charge out of seeing the marker for the now-closed restaurant. And if a brief shot of A1 Records, which is currently in business, is an anachronism, it’s a meaningful one; it may well reflect the kinds of record stores that were there 30 years ago.

Ten Thousand Saints takes its title from a funeral for a teenager, and the movie can be seen as a flawed requiem for a New York City that has all but disappeared.

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10,000 Saints
Written and directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini
With Asa Butterfield, Hailee Steinfeld, Ethan Hawke, Emile Hirsch
Rated R for drug use including teens, language including sexual references
Running time 113 minutes
Opens today at Angelika Pop-Up