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Between Technicolor parallel (The Outsiders) and digital pendant (Tetro), Francis Ford Coppola's febrile fraternal fugue. Teenage wasteland, Tulsa by way of Mars. "Typical fuckin' yahoos" made mythical, blustery mook (Matt Dillon) and cohorts strut into a crumbling depot where foes materialize out of locomotive steam. Prodigal Brother (Mickey Rourke) interrupts their fracas, slouching on his chopper with a whispered quip that barely parts his lips: "Another glorious battle for the kingdom?" Postmodern juveniles, one stunted and the other prematurely aged, born from a boozy father (Dennis Hopper) and a missing mother cursed/blessed with "acute perception." (The sensory element figures in Motorcycle Boy's grasp of the cosmos, "black-and-white TV with the sound turned low.") The dim upstart has a coltish sweetheart (Diane Lane) and a potential usurper (Nicolas Cage) to deal with, meanwhile a comely junkie (Diana Scarwid) and the Flatfoot of Fate (William Smith) crowd the weary wanderer, growing pains one and all. "I'm tired of this Robin Hood and Pied Piper bullshit." A suite of sullen-ethereal images to condense Coppola themes going back to The Rain People, laid out as portentously as adolescence sees itself. Callow inertia under scuttling clouds, spectral presences long before the protagonist's soul takes a levitating view of mist-shrouded mourners. Delicate delinquents, cf. Pasolini's Accattone, question of the emotion behind the posturing. "Hey, my brother's the coolest." "Well, you're better than cool. You're warm." The preoccupation with time means a mise en scène littered with clocks, the ocean beyond the desert is a West Coast Neverland compared to an addled beauty "not knowing she's dying even if you show her the marks." The sensitive wastrel bored with gangs ambles to his doom carrying the allegory in a fishbowl, a fitting stand-in for the director in the '80s. "Even the most primitive society has an innate respect for the insane." Cinematography by Stephen H. Burum. With Vincent Spano, Chris Penn, Laurence Fishburne, Tom Waits, Glenn Withrow, Tracey Walter, Michael Higgins, and Sofia Coppola.
--- Fernando F. Croce |