Sean Burns
The Don was in exile during the early 1980s. After the double barrel box office fiascoes of Hammett and One From the Heart sank his dream of an independent Zoetrope Studios, Francis Ford Coppola up and went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he decided to become the cinematic voice of S.E. Hinton. The author’s seminal teen novels arguably invented the YA genre, and while it might seem like a strange leap from Mario Puzo and Joseph Conrad to Susan Eloise Hinton, Coppola originally decided to adapt The Outsiders because a librarian and a bunch of teenagers asked him to. Jo Ellen Misakian of the Lone Star School in Fresno, California famously sent the filmmaker a letter signed by over 300 students requesting that the Godfather director make a movie out of their favorite book. Fondly recalling his days as a camp counselor, Coppola figured a few months in the country surrounded by kids would be a good way to forget about his financial troubles.
He had such a good time that he stuck around and made another one. Filming The Outsiders during the week, Coppola and Hinton spent their Sundays together adapting her 1975 novel Rumble Fish into a screenplay. The two movies were shot basically back-to-back with a lot of overlapping cast and crew, yet with drastically different approaches to similar stories. The Outsiders was a sweeping melodrama and a grandiose throwback to Hollywood’s Golden Age, blowing Hinton’s adolescent angst up to Technicolor widescreen dimensions, starring an absurdly stacked cast of teen idols on the verge of superstardom. Rumble Fish was the weird one, a brooding, black-and-white character study about an overshadowed, unloved child that was seemingly preordained to meet the same fate at the box office.
Coppola said he wanted to make “an art film for young people,” and Rumble Fish’s wild, German expressionist flourishes were certainly unlike anything this pre-teen had ever seen. It’s a beguilingly strange picture, both grandly mythic and saddeningly small. Matt Dillon stars as Rusty James – always addressed by both names, never just Rusty or James — a greaser punk in a podunk town living in the long shadow of his big brother, known only as the Motorcycle Boy. The larger-than-life local legend lit out for California a long time ago, but Motorcycle Boy mysteriously returns one night in the form of Mickey Rourke – done up to resemble Albert Camus, for some wonderful unknown reason. Like a lot of ‘80s movies and fashions, Rumble Fish exists in a stylistic fugue somewhere between the 1950s and the then-present day, with skyscraper-sized pompadours and an electronic, drum machine score by Stewart Copeland of The Police.
It’s the coolest movie Coppola ever made. Dillion and Diane Lane carry over from the Outsiders cast, but the rest of that film’s Tiger Beat heartthrobs have been replaced by oddballs like Chris Penn, Laurence Fishburne and the director’s nephew, Nicolas Cage. With adult roles filled out by hipster icons Dennis Hopper and Tom Waits, you can see why this is Sofia Coppola’s favorite of her father’s films even before she shows up (under the stage name Domino) as Lane’s nosy little sister. It’s a distractingly beautiful movie. Every shot is like something out of a coffee table book, with the kind of striking, surreal imagery that burns itself into a young viewer’s brain. (Little boys who came of age in the early cable TV era hold a special place in our hearts and minds for Rusty James’ shop class hallucination of a bikini-clad Lane draped atop a bookshelf and beckoning.)
Coppola has always been incapable of making an impersonal picture, pouring his private life into his art to the point of overflowing. He’s often talked in interviews about feeling outshined by his big brother August, a dashing artist and academic who was their father’s favorite. It’s both fascinating and heartbreaking to hear how a man who ascended to the grandest heights of his profession could still see himself as the Fredo of the family, and Rumble Fish is awash in that kind of anxiety. Rusty James’ bravado is all overcompensation, getting by on borrowed moves and a reputation inherited from his older sibling. But things are changing. The days of the rumble gangs are over, the world has moved on, and time is running out for Rusty James.
“Time is a very peculiar item,” muses Waits’ poolhall philosopher, Benny. “You see, when you’re young – you’re a kid – you got time. You got nothin’ but time. Throw away a couple of years here, a couple of years there. It doesn’t matter. You know. The older you get, you say, ‘Jesus, how much I got? I got 35 summers left.’ Think about it. Thirty-five summers.”
Clocks are everywhere in Rumble Fish, looming large and small over the proceedings. The time-lapse shots of whizzing clouds that begin the picture return with a vengeance throughout, speeding their way through windowpane reflections to remind us just how quickly the world is passing these characters by. The percussive tick-tocks of Copeland’s score sound like an alarm clock about to go off. Yet the Motorcycle Boy remains uncannily slow and sure of himself. In a pointed contrast to Dillon’s blowhard machismo, Rourke doesn’t raise his voice above a soft whisper. The actor’s feminine mystique has never been put to more perfect use. Amid all these Method-y shouting and swaggering young actors, Rourke remains older, sadder, and mesmerizingly still. He’s a guy who knows his time has already run out.
“Rumble Fish” is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
