The Motorcycle Boy Reigns:
Why Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish is the ’80s most effective coming-of-age movie
By Daniel Malone
Often overlooked as an experimental indulgence and continually lost in the shadow of The Outsiders (Francis Ford Coppola’s other S E Hinton adaptation released in 1983), Rumble Fish remains an inspired underdog and a film worthy of re-examination.
Having received a letter and lengthy petition from students at Lone Star Elementary School in Fresno, California asking him to turn their favourite book, S E Hinton’s The Outsiders, into a movie, Coppola was impressed with the novel and filming was planned for May of 1982. As the production moved forward, and with a pool of great young actors at his disposal, Coppola decided to collaborate with Hinton on another film as soon it was done. This second film would also be based on Hinton’s work, would be shot in the same location (Tulsa, Oklahoma), use many of the same crew and include actors used in The Outsiders, most notably Matt Dillon and Diane Lane. However, Rumble Fish would become a very different movie; it would be Coppola’s ‘art movie for teenagers.’
Centred around the relationship between two brothers, Rumble Fish follows teenager Rusty James (Matt Dillon) as he attempts to emulate his absent older brother, the enigmatic Motorcycle Boy (Mickey Rourke) to lead a local street gang. Longing for a return to the days of gang warfare, Rusty James struggles to live up to his brother’s reputation, and when the Motorcycle Boy returns, he fails to see the changes that have occurred in his older sibling.
The Outsiders was released in the US on 25th March 1983, with Rumble Fish following only six months later. The decision to release the movies in close succession has arguably affected attitudes towards Rumble Fish over the years and has blighted its legacy. Rumble Fish has rarely been judged on its own merits or in isolation and over its 40-year history the attention has remained centred around Coppola’s The Outsiders; certainly the more populist of the two films, it’s the one with Tom Cruise and Patrick Swayze in after all.
When I first watched Rumble Fish in 1991, I was 16 and although I didn’t realise it at the time, I was the director’s target audience. I was an impressionable teenager searching for a film that looked different from the mainstream but still packed an emotional punch that resonated with my teenage self. At that age I was devouring whatever the year could offer and was taping older, more cult-worthy late-night movies and digesting them whenever I could. Rumble Fish made a lasting impression.
My first experience of the film came via Alex Cox’s Moviedrome series on BBC 2, with Cox’s brief introduction telling me everything I needed to know: this wasn’t going to be a John Hughes-type teen movie; this was going to look different, sound different and would introduce a group of edgy actors I would follow for years to come. It was clear that the film had been unfairly compared to its more conventional and star-studded companion and it was Cox’s view that The Outsiders ‘fell down in the end because it was too big.’ He goes on to explain why Rumble Fish worked despite being a much darker film. It is, he says, ‘more in synch with all the schoolboy-schoolgirl-rumble-anxiety stuff which makes Hinton’s novels so popular.’ Cox also asserted that the movie played in only two cinemas in the US before it went straight to video. This was enough to convince me of its greatness.
The film is overflowing with eye-catching performances. So, where The Outsiders and other teen movies of the ‘80s, most notably The Breakfast Club and St Elmo’s Fire, include great ensemble acting from the group of ‘Brat Pack’ actors (C. Thomas Howell, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez etc), Rumble Fish allows its young cast to give powerful individual performances. Matt Dillon is impressively naturalistic, and Mickey Rourke is captivating as the loner brother. Nicolas Cage and Lawrence Fishburne are also included in a troupe of exciting young actors nurtured and encouraged by Coppola; the actors themselves literally coming of age before our eyes.
When Chris Auty compared the two Coppola/Hinton films in Sight and Sound Magazine in 1984, The Outsiders was ‘the stagey technicolour of 50s Hollywood melodrama’ compared to the ‘Monochrome dream-poem’ of Rumble Fish, indebted as it is to European expressionist cinema. When interviewed for American Cinematographer in 2019, the film’s director of photography, Stephen H.Burum, recognised the acute differences that set the films apart. ‘The style of The Outsiders was very romantic and passionate,’ he says. ‘The compositions were classical and pictorial with the camera removed and stoic’.
The visual style adopted by Coppola for Rumble Fish is a reaction against the idea of the day glow teen movie that would become so popular throughout the decade. Not only are we faced with stark black and white (with specific and crucial moments of colour), the concept of the art film for teenagers gives Coppola scope to include speeded-up clouds, sweeping shadows, time-lapse transitions and an overall obsession with the passing of time (there are clocks everywhere). The use of camera angles, lighting and soundtrack were, according to Coppola, adopted to ‘stimulate a young audience into loving the form as much as I did’. And each art movie flourish in Rumble Fish is integral to the plot. Even the choice to film in high contrast black and white reflects the story being told, as the Motorcycle Boy’s colour blindness means he can only see the world as monochrome. Having recently been asked to consider which of his films he likes the best, Coppola’s response was to suggest that this task was akin to asking him who his favourite child was. When pushed he ultimately responded: "I love them all, but if I scratched deeper, I might say Rumble Fish."
Of course, the 1980s were awash with coming-of-age movies, and while many are considered classics of the genre, they are largely formulaic and uninspired. With the possible exception of The Breakfast Club (1985), the serious teen angst is generally toned down in ‘80s coming-of-age movies and realism is exchanged for primary colours, comedy sidekicks and interchangeable pop soundtracks (in contrast to Stewart Copeland’s Rumble Fish score which is as experimental as the film itself).
The genre continued down a repetitive rabbit hole as the decade progressed, where the focus moved away from teen angst and settled on the derivative and overdone boy-meets-girl story. The John Hughes-directed Pretty in Pink was such a success in 1986 that by the time we reached 1989, the movie was practically remade with the sex of the lead characters reversed to give you the John Hughes produced, Some Kind of Wonderful. There is nothing to match Rumble Fish’s ambition and little else that deals as effectively with themes of alienation and loneliness.
Any Coming-of-age tale has a requirement to be a youth-centred story that concentrates on the lead character’s journey from adolescence to adulthood. With its agenda defined early on, Rumble Fish is the perfect example of this. The required coming-of-age journey is so concentrated and distilled that it’s all that the film is about. Without distraction, we’re following Rusty James from single-minded street thug to free-thinking man as he becomes an independent adult at the end of the film; a man escaping his life in Tulsa having finally (and satisfyingly) followed in his brother’s footsteps by journeying to the sea in California.
Rumble Fish may be a cult favourite but it remains something of a lost film; one that rarely gets mentioned as one of the director’s greatest works (largely because Coppola’s greatest works are so great) whereas out of a filmography spanning six decades, it is arguably his most personal film. When he read Hinton’s novel, Coppola was drawn to Rusty James, identifying with a younger brother who hero-worships his older sibling, just as he had done as a boy. The film itself is dedicated to Coppola’s older brother, August (father of Nicolas Cage).
Putting aside Coppola’s recent endorsement of the movie, perhaps part of the problem is that Rumble Fish simply doesn’t fit. It’s too experimental to sit alongside Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink or even Stand by Me; too dark to be a comfortable companion to The Outsiders; and it’s shackled with being a lesser Francis Ford Coppola movie. If Rumble Fish hadn’t been directed by the man that gave us The Godfather, Apocalypse Now and The Conversation, would it be remembered differently?
So, while it might always be relegated to second place in Coppola’s duo of teen dramas, when compared to the froth and cliche of ‘80s coming-of-age movies, Rumble Fish still reigns.
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