Writer-director John Sayles\u2019s Baby It\u2019s You<\/em> starts out like a familiar high school romance where we think we know the players. An incandescent Rosanna Arquette stars as Jill, the buttoned-up good girl who can\u2019t help falling for our brooding bad boy, played by Vincent Spano. The film hits all the expected beats of this timeworn genre, culminating in Jill and Sheik having a big blowout argument and breaking up right before the prom. If you\u2019ve ever seen a movie before, you\u2019ll be impatiently waiting for the inevitable climactic reconciliation on the dance floor in front of all their classmates. Except it never happens. Sheik gets in trouble with the cops and skips town, headed for Miami Beach. Jill goes stag to the prom, then off to college. We\u2019re only halfway through the movie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So much more than a tale of lovestruck teens, Baby It\u2019s You<\/em> is a sad and sometimes uncomfortably perceptive picture about the gaps between who we are and the people we wish we were. It\u2019s telling that both Jill and Sheik share dreams of performing. She wants to be an actress, he a nightclub crooner, and the film is tough enough to show us that neither are particularly gifted. Jill may have starred in all the school plays back home in Trenton, but at Sarah Lawrence they\u2019re teaching Stanislavski and she can\u2019t get cast in anything. Meanwhile, down in Miami, Sheik works six nights a week as a dishwasher so that on his evening off the owner will let him practice his \u201cact\u201d \u2013 i.e. lip-syncing to Frank Sinatra records for bored retirees. Sheik can\u2019t even sing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Arquette has never been better than when she\u2019s struggling at Sarah Lawrence, drinking too much and trying on different personalities in a vain effort to blend in with her WASP classmates (including a baby Matthew Modine and an absolutely savage Tracy Pollan, who\u2019s like an Edith Wharton villainess that can also shoot pool). Jill was used to being a big fish in a pond she\u2019d never realized was so small, which is what happens to a lot of us when we get to college.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I go back and forth on Spano\u2019s performance. At first he doesn\u2019t seem as magnetic as he should be, but then the whole point of the character is that he\u2019s kind of a letdown. What makes Baby It\u2019s You<\/em> so special is that it\u2019s not a movie about Jill and Sheik getting back together, but rather the two of them learning to accept how much they meant to each other and moving on with their lives. First loves rarely last forever, but at least these two finally get to go to the prom. Sort of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sayles\u2019s screenplay was based on a semi-autobiographical short story by producer Amy Robinson. Most of us remember her as Charlie\u2019s girlfriend from Mean Streets<\/em>, but behind the scenes in the 1980s, Robinson and her producing partner Griffin Dunne\u2019s were responsible for a remarkable run of intelligent, idiosyncratic pictures, starting with Joan Micklin Silver\u2019s Chilly Scenes of Winter<\/em><\/a>, then Baby It\u2019s You<\/em>, followed by Martin Scorsese\u2019s After Hours<\/em><\/a> and Sidney Lumet\u2019s Running on Empty<\/em>. The only thing these movies have in common is their excellence. Well, that and the fact that none of them exactly lit up the box office, yet have grown considerably in estimation over the years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Baby It\u2019s You<\/em> was Sayles\u2019s third feature, his first and last for a major studio. When Paramount execs saw the grosses for Porky\u2019s<\/em> and Fast Times at Ridgemont High<\/em>, they tried re-cutting it into a typical teenage sex comedy. But the footage –not to mention the filmmaker\u2014resisted such a reading. The frustrated studio wound up releasing Sayles\u2019s version of the picture with barely any advertising. He\u2019s been an indie stalwart ever since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fittingly for a movie about first love, there were a lot of first times here. Baby It\u2019s You<\/em> was the first American film shot by legendary cinematographer Michael Ballhaus. Fresh off 15 movies with the recently deceased Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the German lenser would go on to shoot After Hours<\/em> for Robinson and Dunne, beginning an incredible creative partnership with Scorsese (highlights of which include but are not limited to The Last Temptation of Christ<\/em>, Goodfellas<\/em>, The Age of Innocence<\/em> and The Departed<\/em>.) Baby It\u2019s You<\/em> was also the first credited role for a charming young actor named Robert Downey, Jr., but alas, he\u2019s barely visible in the final cut. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The film was also the first to use the music of Bruce Springsteen. On a recent episode of the delightful Watch With Jen<\/a> podcast, Dunne talked to host Jen Johans about being \u201can autodidact music supervisor\u201d before such a job existed, back when licensing pop songs wasn\u2019t a cottage industry unto itself. The Baby It\u2019s You<\/em> soundtrack is such a wall-to-wall barrage of hits it\u2019s almost comical, boasting, in addition to Bruce, Sinatra, Dusty Springfield, The Righteous Brothers, Procol Harum, The Supremes, Simon and Garfunkel, The Isley Brothers, and most amusingly, The Velvet Underground, whose \u201cVenus in Furs\u201d scares the crap out of Jill\u2019s stoned roommate. Dunne claims he amassed the rights by cold-calling a lot of the artists himself, infuriating certain record company reps to the point of apoplexy. But when it came time to ask the Boss, he says Sayles was the one who picked up the phone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The mutual lovefest between the bard of Factorytown, NJ and the denim-clad director from Schenectady, NY should have surprised nobody. (Sayles went on to helm the videos for \u201cGlory Days,\u201d \u201cI\u2019m On Fire,\u201d and \u201cBorn in the U.S.A.”) I realize that Springsteen songs recorded in the 1970s are technically anachronistic to the time period of Baby It\u2019s You<\/em>, but it sure doesn\u2019t feel that way when Sheik struts into the cafeteria backed by the opening growl of \u201cIt\u2019s Hard To Be a Saint in the City.\u201d Besides, Sayles and Springsteen\u2019s sensibilities are so simpatico it\u2019s impossible to imagine this movie without his music. Both artists share a complex understanding of the American experience in all its maddening contradictions, plus enormous affinities for characters like Jill and Sheik, regular folks whose lives are full and have stories worth telling, even as their dreams remain stubbornly out of reach.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Baby It’s You” is streaming on Paramount+<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/baby-its-you1-1024x576.jpg\")
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