Roger Ebert Home

Bob Dylan

Reviews

Blog Posts

MZS

30 Minutes on "Not Fade Away"

The first theatrical feature film written and directed by David Chase, the creator of “The Sopranos,” is an autobiographical tale about the formation of an artistic sensibility. John Magaro plays Doug Damiano, a northern New Jersey teenager whose father Pat (James Gandolfini) is a hot-tempered, Archie Bunker-style reactionary who suffers from psoriasis, and whose mother Antoinette (Molly Price) is a depressive who regularly threatens to kill herself. The movie is narrated by Doug’s sister Evelyn, played by Meg Guzulescu, in the manner of a third-person novel, packing three films’ worth of incident into an hour and 50 minutes yet somehow never feeling rushed.