In Brooklyn of 1965, St. Basil’s Catholic Boys School receives a new student, Michael Dunn (Andrew McCarthy), an orphaned teen sent with his sister to live with their grandparents. Dunn befriends another outsider, Caesar (Malcolm Danare), the brain of the student body. Caesar endures the torments of Rooney (Kevin Dillon), a cocky athlete who manages to work the word “faggot” into nearly every sentence.

Instructing the boys is the tough but fair headmaster Brother Thadeus (Donald Sutherland), the progressive Brother Timothy (John Heard), and the sadistic Brother Constance (Jay Patterson), whose classroom punishments become more extreme as Rooney’s stunts grow more numerous.

Dunn stands up to Rooney, who befriends the new kid rather than go through the hassle of kicking his ass every time they come into contact. Hanging out at the soda fountain across the street, Dunn meets Danni (Mary Stuart Masterson), a tough talking high school dropout who runs the shop for her despondent father. Dunn takes all the degradation he can from Brother Constance, but with Danni’s help, finally decides to do something about it.

Producer Dan Wigutow had left L.A. to move to New York in search of fresh material. He found an NYU Film School dropout named Charles Purpura, an East Coast singer, songwriter and playwright who had written a semi-autobiographical screenplay about his school days called Catholic Boys just as National Lampoon’s Animal House was taking the box office by storm.

The script went through rewrites over four years. Fox liked the idea, but objected to Wigutow’s choice of director, Michael Dinner, whose experience was limited to TV. Silver Screen, a new film unit of HBO, was searching for projects and agreed to finance Catholic Boys. Retitled Heaven Help Us on the insistence of its distributor – Tri-Star – the picture was marketed as a horny teenager movie, and encountered mixed reactions.

Heaven Help Us is a feloniously overlooked film, an offbeat, character driven sleeper. Charles Purpura’s script feels personal, but like a good novel, it defies categorization. There’s some raunch, but it’s not a teenage comedy. There’s melodrama, but it’s not a heartwarming coming-of-age tale. It’s definitely not a romantic comedy, in spite of a relationship that develops between Andrew McCarthy and Mary Stuart Masterson’s characters.

The cast should be indication of how good this script was. In addition to Donald Sutherland and John Heard – who received top billing – Mary Stuart Masterson continues to impress me. She owned the teenage gal pal parts of the ’80s and this is one of her most admirable. Kevin Dillon plays bully, homophobe, would-be date rapist, prankster and standup guy all in the same movie, and his performance would be reason enough to recommend the film.

Stephen Geoffreys and Patrick Dempsey appear as Dillon’s buddies. Yeardley Smith plays a nerd with a crush on Caesar, while Wallace Shawn steals the flick as a brother who fervently lectures the student body on lust. Dunn’s sister Boo (Jennifer Dundas) collects flowers and lays under the covers, pretending to be dead, until her brother performs last rites. Even the late Calvert DeForest – Larry “Bud” Melman – pops up, playing the most memorable drawbridge operator in film history.

I’m not a fan of Andrew McCarthy’s, and the character he plays here is low key, almost passive, but I didn’t mind. The movie has a natural, unforced rhythm and felt real to me. Most of all, it’s really, really funny. Dillion’s exclamation while the boys watch Blue Hawaii (”Jesus, what’d they do to Elvis? Cut his balls off or something?”) cracked me up. This is absolutely worth a rental.