“That was me at my five-year-old birthday party. I was good-looking even back then.”

September 9^th, 2012

Rumble Fish (1983)

Nicolas Cage is Smokey

Ostensibly this project is about Nic Cage but, since I'm going in chronological order, by default I'm starting with his bit parts. It's funny, with the benefit of hindsight I think it's clear that Cage's most natural fit is as a character actor, but he's made a career as an unlikely leading man. I guess that's what happens to talented weirdos who also happen to be extremely handsome (see also: Depp, Johnny; Ledger, Heath). But Rumble Fish isn't Nic Cage's film. He's here because when your brilliant, film director uncle sends out a casting call you put aside all that stuff about distancing yourself from him and jump on the wagon (three times).  

I knew nothing going into Rumble Fish so the whole thing was a surprise to me. My familiarity with Coppola's work between Apocalypse Now and Jack is pretty limited. I've never read an S.E. Hinton novel nor have I seen The Outsiders. I didn't know it was starring Matt Dillon as a teenager that everyone, including his family, calls Rusty James. I didn't know that Rusty James lives in the shadow of his spacey older brother, an ex-gang leader named The Motorcycle Boy (Mickey Rourke) whom he idolizes. I didn't know it was scored by Stewart Copeland, drummer for that band so dear to my heart, the Police. Hey, is that Tom Waits as a soda jerk? Hey, is that Dennis Hopper? Is this all a beautiful dream?

Shot in black and white with stray splashes of color, Rumble Fish is a film peculiarly out of time. It pulls it's style and rhythms of the '80s to evoke a sort of fantasy dream vision of the teenage rebellion tropes Coppolla grew up watching. Rumble Fish is at turns a kitchen sink drama and an early MTV sketch. 

An unrelentingly nervy film, Rumble Fish seems content for much of its running time to bask in the misguided bravado and self-mythologizing of teenage toughs without blowing some of that smoke away and revealing what's behind it all. The mix of Copeland's skittery, percussive score and cinematography that apes Nicholas Ray (himself aping German expressionists like Robert Wiene) keeps the energy taught even in the film's quieter moments. Where Apocalypse Now and The Godfather spin large-scale tragedies into works of meditative wonder, Rumble Fish works small but never gives any breathing room. 

 

It's also an unmistakably personal film. Coppola reportedly grew up revering of his own older brother, August Coppola, a respected academic and educator who, it just so happens, fathered Nicolas Cage. Rumble Fish is dedicated to August and features Cage as Smokey Rusty James' right-hand man who (spoiler) steals his girl. Is that a spoiler? It happens two-thirds of the way through the movie but it's really just another mark of time passing by Rusty James even as he digs his heels in. 

 

Rumble Fish is a film about nostalgic film about the danger of nostalgia. Rusty James spends the movie yearning for a past he just missed, for a chance to be a revered gangleader and brawler like Motorcycle Boy, without realizing that the time of that kind of brawler is gone. Sometimes as we grow we find ourselves looking straight-on, eye-to-eye with things we once looked up to. Sometimes we're even looking down on them. The same year that Rumble Fish came out Tom Waits – who had made a career selling the kind of trawling, jive-talking cool he embodies here – released Swordfishtrombones, a genre-shattering album that both evokes and eviscerates tin-pan folk music while recasting Waits as an avant-garde Janus. It was the year Sonic Youth released their seminal EP-cum-statement-of-purpose Kill Yr Idols. And it was the year Nicolas Coppola rechristened himself as Nicolas Cage. Don't look back, y'all. The future is already upon us.