In 1982, Francis Ford Coppola briefly made dramatizing the works of young adult author S.E. Hinton his entire personality. Licking his wounds in the aftermath of his self-financed passion project One From the Heart failing to make any impression with the filmgoing public, the director followed a familiar path to try and resurrect his career: adapting a popular novel and casting it with young actors who would go on to define Hollywood for generations. That film, 1983’s The Outsiders, based on the beloved Hinton book of the same name, was not only a modest hit, but it functionally birthed the Brat Pack. However, Coppola, never one to take the easy way out or quit while he was ahead, became consumed with another one of Hinton’s novels, 1975’s Rumble Fish, and once again found himself wresting financial ruin from the jaws of success. Written with Hinton during the filming of The Outsiders while on location in Tulsa and retaining much of the crew and several of the actors from the earlier film, Coppola fronted the production himself until Universal Pictures agreed to finance and distribute the film after it was already several weeks into shooting.
Shot in atmospheric black-and-white and emphasizing the lyrical yet aimless qualities of the source material, the film was a bomb when it was released only seven months after The Outsiders, earning back a fraction of its budget and putting Coppola back in the same hole he’d only just clawed his way out of. Yet Rumble Fish remains an essential window into the filmmaker and his evolving interests as an artist. Even as an adaptation, Rumble Fish is deeply personal, wrapped up in Francis’ profound admiration for his own older brother, August, to whom the film is dedicated. In spite of all of his success as a filmmaker, Coppola the younger still identifies with the callow Rusty James (Matt Dillon), who willingly resides in the shadow of his more charismatic sibling addressed only as The Motorcycle Boy (Mickey Rourke), as self-assured as he is melancholic about the realization that the way of life he dedicated himself to was all for naught. Further, Rumble Fish is as formally adventurous a film as the director had made up to that point — and possibly since — incorporating visual touchstones of German Expressionism and the French New Wave to create something mythical yet also crushingly intimate. It’s a level of subjective filmmaking that can be bracing for the unsuspecting viewer. Here, the film’s style very much is its substance.
We meet teenaged Rusty James — in a nod to its literary origins, the character is addressed by his full name without shortening or adoption of a nickname, no less than 25 times — working himself up for a fight, or “rumble” in the parlance of the film, with the leader of a rival gang. Rusty James commands a ragtag group of teen hoodlums who mostly hang out and shoot pool — as in The Outsiders, the film is a who’s who of young Hollywood, with Nicolas Cage, Laurence Fishburne, and Chris Penn all part of his crew — having inherited the turf from his brother who took off on his motorcycle for the west coast some months back. It’s a time of transition for the gangs, and Tulsa in general: before he left, The Motorcycle Boy brokered a truce that was meant to end the rumbles for good, but a vacuum emerged in his absence and heroin use has become pervasive, further destabilizing a governing hierarchy that already felt entirely vestigial. Rusty James claims he can’t wait to trade blows, but his mind is elsewhere, specifically set on making out with his high school squeeze Patty (Diane Lane who, like Dillon, appears both here and in The Outsiders); so much so that he passes out on her couch after some heavy-petting and is almost late to his own street fight.
The film’s rumbles — of which there are fewer than one might think based on its title — reflect Rumble Fish’s outside-of-time quality. Although ostensibly set in the present, the film eschews signifiers like contemporary models of vehicles or modern music and, in fact, consciously blurs the line of exactly when this is meant to be set with its costuming and production design, which read as from the late ‘50s or early ‘60s. Accordingly, the scrums feel indebted to old greaser movies and even West Side Story, with combatants circling one another with knives and literally bouncing off the wall in what look to be highly choreographed dances. Rusty James yearns for a time that probably never existed; when gangs were feared and respected in equal measure and masculinity was clearly defined and inexorably tied to violence. Although The Motorcycle Boy is only a few years older than his brother, the way Rusty James talks about him takes on an air of legend that he’s forever falling short of living up to. So when The Motorcycle Boy returns, as if he has teleported in from parts unknown astride his chopper, he represents, in theory, a return to the ways of old. Yet in The Motorcycle Boy’s sad eyes, soft-spoken tenor, and philosophical demeanor, it’s clear the former gang leader couldn’t be less interested in the idea.
Rourke had by this point already had a scene-stealing extended cameo in Body Heat and was featured as part of the ensemble in Diner, but Rumble Fish is arguably his first lead (or co-lead, anyway) role, and even now, some 40 years later, the actor is a revelation as The Motorcycle Boy. Barely speaking above a whisper yet holding the camera’s gaze in a death grip, Rourke is almost distractingly beautiful even with his hair a mop of untamed cowlicks. He has the screen presence to inspire devotion but the self-awareness to sell lines like, “You know, if you’re gonna lead people, you have to have somewhere to go.” The character casts a long shadow — literally, in a film that took visual inspiration from the likes of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari — and what’s remarkable about the performance is how Rourke carries himself like a god, one who could easily squash a man like a bug if it didn’t feel beneath him, while actively working to undermine his self-made mythology in his every action and word. He dismisses his time as king of the heap with a zen-like bluntness, telling Rusty James of rumbles past that “it wasn’t anything,” and moments later, “it was fun at first, then it got to be a big bore.” He comes across like a man haunted by his sojourn to California to find the mother who abandoned the boys and their alcoholic father (Dennis Hopper), although less for what he experienced out in the world than his resignation over being unable to stay away. He briefly escaped his old habits and past transgressions, but something inside of him ultimately forced him to return, and now he foresees that he won’t be able to leave again.
The characters of Rumble Fish are forever consumed with time (people running late, reflecting on days of yore, the sensation that time is running out, etc.), and Coppola incorporates the idea into the film’s visual design. It becomes a bit of a running gag to spot all of the film’s timepieces, most overtly in an exchange set against a towering decommissioned clock face strapped to the side of a van. Beyond the use of literal clocks, we get numerous shots of shadows growing longer and clouds passing rapidly in time-lapse shots. There’s a pervasive sense that there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do but fool around, drink, and slam junk into your arms, and all the while the grains of sand continue to pass through the hourglass. Rusty James doesn’t seem to notice, but The Motorcycle Boy is acutely aware of how impermanent life is and how silly slashing at one another with switchblades is, all just to honor some antiquated view of toughness. While his little brother is intent on making all the same mistakes that he made, The Motorcycle Boy is simply obsessed with the all too symbolic Siamese fighting fish at the pet store — presented in vibrant color, in stark contrast to the surrounding film’s monochrome — who can be easily goaded into rumbles themselves and who he’d like to see released into the local river, believing it will eventually take them out to sea. If he can’t get away from a hopeless existence, maybe at least they can.
Emotions are close to the surface in Rumble Fish, and it’s reflected in the way Coppola, along with D.P. Stephen H. Burum (best known for his longtime collaboration with fellow film school brat Brian De Palma), frames the actors. The performers are often uncomfortably close to one another — Rourke in particular seems to have taken to the idea of invading Dillon’s personal space as a display of fraternal affection — and the camera, in turn, is almost always inches away from the actor’s faces. Burum favors wide-angle shots which allow the actors to be in the extreme foreground while keeping everything in focus, distorting depth of field while allowing action to play out continuously across the frame without extraneous cutting. It allows for an uncommon level of playfulness, in capturing the youthful vigor of the characters, as in a series of daydream sequences where Rusty James imagines Patty splayed out in lingerie hovering over shop class (where he’s quite literally working with his wood). In an especially damning indictment of Rusty James’ myopia, the character’s spirit levitates above his body after being bashed over the head during a mugging and travels across town to check in on how his passing is being memorialized by his loved ones and, after floating over to Patty’s to note that she’s crying over him and to the local billiards hall where his four friends are raising a glass in his honor, his “soul,” perhaps recognizing that he doesn’t know or especially care about anyone else, returns to his lifeless form.
Rumble Fish is a stylistic inflection point for Coppola; a return to his more experimental roots while also pushing even harder on the idea of craft calling attention to itself than he did even with the knowingly artificial-looking One From the Heart. It’s a recurring strain that has cropped up subsequently in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Twixt, and Coppola’s most recent film Megalopolis, one that has such highfalutin aims as blowing up past means of production and exhibition to embrace a vague idea of modernity (how successful he was in that endeavor is best reserved for another essay). However, Rumble Fish feels like the first time the filmmaker was comfortable prioritizing form as an end unto itself, allowing him to scale up a modest tale of young male angst and the crushing weight of self-imposed expectations into something practically operatic — as though it can barely be confined by the dimensions of the screen. No one would dare call Rumble Fish the best film in Coppola’s oeuvre — such is the burden of sustained greatness — but it’s the work that revealed the poet living inside the director, and one that still pushes the boundaries of the medium to this day.
Published as part of Francis Ford Coppola: As Big As Possible.
Comments are closed.