Rumble Fish (1983)

Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish was released in 1983. Audiences stayed away in droves. In the 80s Coppola was reinventing himself as the crazed visionary wild man of American cinema. This resulted in a series of spectacular box office failures.

It seems like it’s going to be a juvenile gang movie. Rusty James (Matt Dillon) leads a gang in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He’s about to face a showdown with a rival gang leader, Biff. During the fight his big brother (referred to throughout the film merely as The Motorcycle Boy and played by Mickey Rourke).

The Motorcycle Boy had left town suddenly and mysteriously a couple of years before. Rusty James idolised his big brother. Now he’s back and this sets up certain expectation in Rusty James, expectations which will be disappointed. The Motorcycle Boy had been a big shot. Rusty James assumes that he will now reassume his big shot status and lead the gang to glory in its battles with rival gangs.

Rather than doing this, The Motorcycle Boy broods mysteriously. He continues to brood mysteriously for the rest of the picture.

Their dad, played by Dennis Hopper, is an alcoholic loser. His wife, the mother of the two boys, walked out on him years ago and went to California (in this movie California is like a fabled land across the seas).

Rusty James has a girlfriend, Patty (Diane Lane). She’s a typical high school girl girl. Rusty James treats her with contempt.

The Motorcycle Boy keeps on brooding. Rusty James indulges himself in childish tantrums and self-pity. Nothing really happens until the ending which I guess we’re supposed to see as tragically inevitable.

Coppola also saw this as a movie about time. He does come up with some interesting ways to evoke the passage of time. But in this movie the passage of time is largely meaningless. At the beginning of the story Rusty James is violent, self-pitying and as dumb as a rock. By the end of the story he is violent, self-pitying and as dumb as a rock. At the beginning of the story The Motorcycle Boy is brooding mysteriously. By the end of the story we still have no idea what he was brooding about.

A story about a kid hero-worshipping a big brother had a personal resonance for Coppola since he had hero-worshipped his own big brother.

The movie is based on a novel by S.E. Hinton who also co-wrote the screenplay. It really does feel like a story written by a woman, a woman with zero understanding of men and zero interest in trying to understand them.

This was the golden age of Hollywood flops. Movies like Heaven’s Gate, Ishtar and Waterworld. Some of these - The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, Cut-Throat Island, Hudson Hawk and Coppola’s own One from the Heart - were actually great movies and it’s difficult to see why they flopped. But it’s very easy to see why Rumble Fish flopped.

Coppola went to extraordinary lengths to ensure the film’s commercial failure. He shot it in black-and-white, which in 1983 made it impossible to market.

Stewart Copeland of The Police wrote the score. It’s jarring, discordant and bizarre. That’s apparently what Coppola wanted but it’s jarring, discordant and bizarre in a way that doesn’t fit the tone of the movie.

All of the characters are unlikeable losers. A movie about unlikeable losers can be fascinating if they’re unlikeable losers in interesting ways. But these people are irritating and uninteresting.

The Motorcycle Boy is clearly meant to be a mythic outsider figure. Coppola wanted Mickey Rourke to look like Camus so he clearly had a bit of an existentialist theme in mind - the Motorcycle Boy as a complete outsider totally detached from the world around him. That can work but it requires an actor with the right kind of charisma. It’s the sort of thing that Alain Delon could do effortlessly. Mickey Rourke just doesn’t have that charisma so he comes over as a dime-store would-be Camus.

It sounds like I’m doing a hatchet job on this movie but it does have its strengths. It looks extraordinary. At this point in his career Coppola had a knack for making movies that did not look like anyone else’s movies and did not feel like anyone else’s movies.

Everything about the way it’s shot, and especially the continual use of smoke that seems to come from nowhere, gives it an odd feeling of unreality. In a way that anticipates some of David Lynch’s later movies we’re given the impression that we’re not exactly in the world of everyday reality. At times it feels like a descent into Hell.

Rumble Fish is a failure but it’s an interesting failure.