This movie is sprawling, brawling, and flawed, but a lot of fun. It would have been better if DiCarpio were a few years older; he seemed a bit callow in this role and would be better-suited now. Day-Lewis is, of course, amazing. For anyone interested, the main Bowery Boys/Dead Rabbits battle took place on July 4th, 1857. So the battles set in 1846 and in 1863 during the riots are fictional. History professor and expert in 19th cent. New York Vincent DiGirolamo points out the problem with such invention: "'Gangs of New York' becomes a historical epic with no change over time. The effect is to freeze ethnocultural rivalries over the course of three decades and portray them as irrational ancestral hatreds unaltered by demographic shifts, economic cycles, and political realignments." As others have pointed out, William Poole, the basis for Bill, was never known to have killed anyone. I do like how this film portrays the contentiousness of the Civil War and how many Northerners were violently opposed to Lincoln, the war, and esp. the draft. Nearly one hundred blacks were murdered in the 1863 riots; this film reminds us that Union states were hardly full of abolitionists. To consider the hatred in this film unpalatable is to be in denial of our country's hateful and blood-soaked past.