EXCELLENT performances by a good cast and a fairly authentic look at working-class struggles go only so far in Brian Jun’s “Steel City,” which paints an industrial Minnesota municipality entirely in tones of gray and blue.
Thomas Guiry plays a young man who is essentially abandoned when his dad (John Heard) is jailed on charges of vehicular manslaughter.
He moves in with his happily remarried mother (Laurie Metcalf) and her cop husband, but they throw him out when his temper gets him fired from a job at a restaurant where he has a tentative relationship with a co-worker (a pre-“Ugly Betty” America Ferrara).
Our hero then goes to live with an ex-Marine uncle (P.J. Barry), but it takes some major revelations – and some flowery dialogue – for “Steel City” to arrive at a way-too-pat ending.
STEEL CITY
Running time: 96 minutes. Rated R (profanity, drug use). At the Quad, 13th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues.