There’s only one story about the end of youth. Everybody tells the same one, just in different settings. It’s a story about the mistakes that form a person, along with the bad friends, the good friends, the fun times we have and the fun times that slip through our clumsy fingers. Then a hundred changes happen at once when school ends and friends scatter. There’s more than one way to react to that and this adaptation of Richard Price’s 1974 novel, drawn from his own youth in the Dion-and-pomade early 1960s Bronx, New York covers a few of ’em. That’s the real point here, not the reality of young hoods who run with gangs. The gang here is something to grow out of, like mouthing off to the teacher at school or getting sex on the sly while sneaking around your parents. It’s a very different film from The Warriors, though the two are often compared. Price’s novel is composed of twelve darkly funny short stories that deal with the same group of young hotheads, hornballs, psychos and the girls who have to suffer them. The secondary character of one story might be the main character in the next. Each chapter reads well on its own, but taken together it all makes a profane panorama of teen life and teen death in the doo-wop days. For the film, director and co-writer Philip Kaufman keeps as much of Price’s material as he can, chopping off appendages where he must but never losing the heart. Kaufman works it into an ensemble piece that weaves together a collection of episodes and subplots that don’t so much work toward tidy resolutions as they do form a picture of a place and of a time when we’re all wanderers.