Rumble Fish

During the 80s, when Francis Coppola was no longer a towering figure in American cinema, he made a lot of films for hire, seeking to relieve the debt he incurred for One From the Heart. He still, though, maintained a creative spirit, and that is evident in the films he made in 1983 of two young adult novels by S.E. Hinton. I wrote about The Outsiders a few years ago. Immediately following that film, he made another of a Hinton novel, Rumble Fish. It is both visually arresting and infuriating.

Coppola was outwardly making a European art film. It's as if Michelangelo Antonioni had been dropped in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but had also been robbed of the mystery that he brought to his films. The story, about aimless juvenile delinquents, is pumped full of allusion and metaphor, and doesn't amount to much, but Coppola stuffs it to the gills with "meaning."

Shot in exquisite black and white by Stephen H. Burum, Rumble Fish is frequently stunning to look at. However, the story just doesn't serve the visuals, and there are too many shots that scream "look at me!" I'm skeptical of any film that includes one shot of clouds racing by in a storefront window, let alone the three or four that are in this film. Coppola has made this a story about characters who are running out of time, so to reinforce that, we see clocks at almost every juncture.

The story concerns Rusty James (Matt Dillon), a juvenile delinquent. After a balletic rumble with a rival, in which he gets slashed by a piece of glass, he is rescued by his elder brother, called The Motorcycle Boy (Mickey Rourke), who at one time ruled the gangs of Tulsa, but has been gone for a couple of years. He went out to California to find his mother, but returned to the misery of his life in Oklahoma, with his alcoholic father (Dennis Hopper). Rourke, at 21, is seen as a something of a god by the youth of the town, for his Zen ways and worldliness.

Dillon is not as smart as his brother. He courts a local girl (Diane Lane), and is wistful about the end of the gangs, who have been broken up by heroin use. He still has something of a crew, that includes the squeaky-clean Vincent Spano and a Chris Penn and Nicolas Cage. Meanwhile a cop (William Smith), waits for Rourke to slip up.

There's not much action after that first fight. Dillon and Rourke hit the town, and Dillon and Spano get roughed up by muggers (which allows Coppola to have Dillon levitate over his body). Rourke seems to realize that his time is over, and he becomes fixated on some fish at the local pet shop--Siamese fighting fish that have to separated, or they will kill each other. He thinks the fish should be freed into the river. To make sure we don't miss the metaphor, the fish are the only things in the film that are in color.

So the film becomes mostly posing and attitude, but at times there are some brilliant individual moments, none so more than about a two-minute section that has Rourke and Dillon on a motorcycle, cruising through the late-night streets. The brothers have smiles on their faces, enjoying their time together, and the music, by Stewart Copeland, is a nifty composition involving car horns.

In fact, Copeland's score is the lingering aspect of this film. When I first saw it I rushed and bought the soundtrack album. The music is revolutionary in its way, made up mostly of percussion. The closing song, "Don't Box Me In," sung by Stan Ridgway, is one of the best movie songs I've ever heard.

Though Rumble Fish ultimately doesn't succeed as a whole, it has parts that I'll never forget. There's Copeland's music, Burum's photography, and, I must admit, Lane, who is the teenage girl of my dreams.