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Rumble Fish
t Glasby
Film history is fickle in its affections for Francis Ford Coppola. Part King Midas, part King Cnut, Coppola fell furthest from the lofty heights of New Hollywood: from The Godfather to Jack. Perhaps this Icarus-style tailspin was due to the grandiosity of his vision, perhaps it was because his megalomaniac tendencies were more suited to running a military coup than a movie set. Perhaps it was just the excess weight he was carrying.
Still, crown prince or court jester, there's no denying Coppola got closer to establishing an autonomous power base outside the studio system than anyone, bar George Lucas. He was also goddamned good at adapting unruly novels. When the dust settles, maybe that's what we should remember him for.
Set ostensibly in the 1950s, but taking place in a fetishised film neverwhere of subway fights, motorbikes and pretty girls standing on their momma's porches, Rumble Fish resembles a working-class Rebel Without A Cause or a stylised Stand By Me.
All swagger and bandanna, pecs and borrowed cigarettes, Rusty James (Dillon) is a sometime gang member scratching out a thuggish adolescence in the shadow of his revered older brother, known only as The Motorcycle Boy (the mesmeric Rourke). Trapped in this suffocating milieu, Rusty aspires to lead his fellow wasters (including Chris Penn, Nicolas Cage and Lawrence Fishburne), but it's never going to happen. He's too hot-headed, too far from "word smart" and the way those around him repeat his name in singsong tones suggests the futile reassertion of an ever-slipping identity rather than deference.
Like his alcoholic pa (an extremely well cast Hopper), life is passing him by, and though the film suffers from a similar lack of direction, Coppola's cinematic mastery brings it closer to a kind of breathless, testosterone-thick expressionism than the usual kitchen-sink ennui. At one point we watch time-lapse photography of the shadow of some bars on a metal staircase sliding menacingly down a wall - an escape route inexorably becoming a cage. Throughout, Stewart Copeland's twitchy, ticking score suggests a film racing towards tragedy even though the surface seems still.
Amid the crisp monochrome, the only brightness comes courtesy of the titular fish, a set of pet shop prisoners filmed in saturated primary colours and carrying much the same symbolic import as the little girl in the red coat in Schindler's List. The fish fight their own reflections, an irony that enchants Rourke's character. "I wonder if they act that way in the river," he muses, a gangster masquerading as a poet, or is that the other way round?
He never does find out, and the film's elegiac ending provides creepy real-life parallels aplenty. Coppola has yet to make a film approaching the calibre of this or his early work; Dillon segued into playing stooges and sleazes; Rourke blew away a promising career and, by the looks of it, his face; and Chris Penn died of heart disease at the age of 40 with codeine, cocaine and marijuana in his blood. Life imitating art maybe, but at least they achieved art in the first place.
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