His heroes are three multiculturally correct adolescent homeboys: African-American Tyson (Tyrone Burton), Puerto Rican Hector (Eddie Cutanda), and Vietnamese Bao (Phuong Duong). Having given up on school (in one of the film's many sardonic touches, Tyson answers a call from the Boston Public School's "automated absence report" and is informed by a recorded voice that "your child has been absent for 124 days"), they figure the only way they're going to get any respect is to earn money. They're not getting much of either at the film's beginning as they pump gas for quarters at the local filling station. One customer, JJ (Geoffrey Rhue, formerly of Boston Ballet), offers Tyson some change and an option -- he could join JJ's "Red Shirts" and clean lots for the city for low wages while enjoying the security and solidarity of their youth center. Tyson says he'll think about it.

He starts thinking seriously about it when local gang-bangers pull into the station in their black Pathfinder, humiliate Tyson, order the boys to stay off their turf, and screech out in a blaze of 9mm bullets. In giddy retaliation, the three ambush one of the gang members, beat him up, and steal his money. The exhilaration of their conquest fades quickly when they realize they're now marked for death. In an intense, suffocating scene later in his bathroom, Tyson stares at the stolen bills he's tossed into the toilet, flushes it, then retrieves them. He realizes he and his friends have to find a protector. Should it be the almost too supportive JJ (Hector jokingly calls him "Gay J")? Or Hector's crack-dealing friend Derick (Beresford Bennett), who'll help them out if they sell dope for him? They decide to try both.

It's a stereotypical conflict, but Patton-Spruill wisely focuses on the toll all this takes on the boys, especially Tyson. Played by the brilliant discovery Tyrone Burton, Tyson seems cool and competent until the façade abruptly cracks and he reveals that he is, in fact, only a 14-year-old child. Dreaming of sinking hoops and becoming a seagull, he awakes in a pool of urine. His terror and pain at his initiation into hopelessness is palpable. Patton-Spruill draws on Truffaut's The 400 Blows in rendering this breakdown, but he and Burton make it uniquely theirs.

Other touches are ill-considered. A "decadent" gathering at Derick's seems contrived and naive, and though the stylized wipes that end scenes are clever, this habit and the director's over-fondness for revolving cameras tend to draw attention to the artifice and away from the story. Compensating for the aesthetic over-enthusiasm is Patton-Spruill's eye for local detail. The everyday detritus of Boston becomes numinous: the pitted derelict buildings and debris-cluttered vacant lots, the party-colored neighborhood murals and the rainbow-painted Boston Gas tank by the harbor, the abandoned confines of Boston State Hospital and the vacant bear dens in Franklin Park -- these are transformed into emblems of hope and despair, aspiration and confinement.

Although he's still far from the leagues of Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee, Patton-Spruill has begun to stake his own cinematic turf. In the meantime, Squeeze remains a refreshing reworking of a much abused genre, a film that removes the 'hood from the exploitation of cheap effect and restores it to the hearts of those who suffer and die in it and seek to transform it.