{"id":24292,"date":"2024-09-20T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-09-20T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=24292"},"modified":"2024-09-19T15:51:42","modified_gmt":"2024-09-19T22:51:42","slug":"classic-corner-rumble-fish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/classic-corner-rumble-fish\/","title":{"rendered":"Classic Corner: Rumble Fish"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Don was in exile during the early 1980s. After the double barrel box office fiascoes of Hammett<\/em> and One From the Heart<\/em> 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\u2019s 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<\/em> 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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He had such a good time that he stuck around and made another one. Filming The Outsiders<\/em> during the week, Coppola and Hinton spent their Sundays together adapting her 1975 novel Rumble Fish<\/em> 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<\/em> was a sweeping melodrama and a grandiose throwback to Hollywood\u2019s Golden Age, blowing Hinton\u2019s adolescent angst up to Technicolor widescreen dimensions, starring an absurdly stacked cast of teen idols on the verge of superstardom. Rumble Fish <\/em>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coppola said he wanted to make \u201can art film for young people,\u201d and Rumble Fish<\/em>\u2019s wild, German expressionist flourishes were certainly unlike anything this pre-teen had ever seen. It\u2019s a beguilingly strange picture, both grandly mythic and saddeningly small. Matt Dillon stars as Rusty James \u2013 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 \u2013 done up to resemble Albert Camus, for some wonderful unknown reason. Like a lot of \u201880s movies and fashions, Rumble Fish<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s the coolest movie Coppola ever made. Dillion and Diane Lane carry over from the Outsiders<\/em> cast, but the rest of that film\u2019s Tiger Beat<\/em> heartthrobs have been replaced by oddballs like Chris Penn, Laurence Fishburne and the director\u2019s nephew, Nicolas Cage. With adult roles filled out by hipster icons Dennis Hopper and Tom Waits, you can see why this is Sofia Coppola\u2019s favorite of her father\u2019s films even before she shows up (under the stage name Domino) as Lane\u2019s nosy little sister. It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019 shop class hallucination of a bikini-clad Lane draped atop a bookshelf and beckoning.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Coppola has always been incapable of making an impersonal picture, pouring his private life into his art to the point of overflowing. He\u2019s often talked in interviews about feeling outshined by his big brother August, a dashing artist and academic who was their father\u2019s favorite. It\u2019s 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<\/em> is awash in that kind of anxiety. Rusty James\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTime is a very peculiar item,\u201d muses Waits\u2019 poolhall philosopher, Benny. \u201cYou 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, \u2018Jesus, how much I got? I got 35 summers left.\u2019 Think about it. Thirty-five summers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clocks are everywhere in Rumble Fish<\/em>, 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\u2019s 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\u2019s blowhard machismo, Rourke doesn\u2019t raise his voice above a soft whisper. The actor\u2019s 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\u2019s a guy who knows his time has already run out.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Rumble Fish” is streaming on Amazon Prime Video<\/a>. <\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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