Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Rumble Fish!

Do u think the fish motif or the fish-eye lens visual pun came first in the creative process?

You've been successfully bullied out of liking Donnie Darko but you still want an entry-level (not an insult) arthouse-for-teens-and-young-adults kino. Enter Rumble Fish, the most overlooked movie from Godfather and Apocalypse Now director Francis Ford Coppola, who spiraled into massive credit card debt over Apocalypse and failed to bail himself out with flop musical One From the Heart, which explains in part why his 80s tenure is obscure while other New Hollywood-era filmmakers like Scorsese continued to pump out the hits. If you're going to tank your long-term viability over a project, it might as well be Apocalypse Now, but after it, nothing in the Coppola oeuvre has made much of a splash, unless you count his nepotism baby's single worthwhile outing Lost in Translation (yeah, I like shoegaze. Blow me).

"♪Ciiiity giiiiirl/I love youooooouooo/Iii dooo..." - me in the shower

To be honest, most of that obscurity is no great loss. No one is going to his grave agonising that he never saw Peggy Sue Got Married. Rumble Fish is different. Picture Rebel Without a Cause filtered through German Expressionism with a bit of that Koyaanisqatsi time-lapse magic that was cutting-edge at the time, with the subtlest frisson of The Warriors or Streets of Fire stylization to its monochrome urban jungle setting. No adolescent will be bored by an art flick featuring setpieces like this subway beatdown:

Nor will any cinésnob fail to be moved by the film's casual diversions into dreamlike flights of fantasy:

Yes, that hack Spielb*rg ripped off this device for his rancid Oscarbait Schindler's List, but try to imagine how cool it must have looked back then.

Matt Dillon (Wild Things) plays Rusty James, a somewhat dense Brad in a teen street gang that calls street fights "rumbles". Mickey Rourke plays his older brother, The Motorcycle Kid, with a conspicuously Kurtzian burned-out poet-of-doom sort of vibe. Rusty James idolises The Motorcycle Kid as the badass anyone called The Motorcycle Kid would have to be to stay called The Motorcycle Kid for long, but TMK starts to drop hints he doesn't want Rusty James following in his footsteps. Perhaps to underscore the Apocalypse Now resonances, Dennis Hopper is cast as their alcoholic dad. Probably not to make you (me) rewatch Streets of Fire for the 14th time, Diane Lane is cast as Rusty James's gf. Because he's Coppola's nephew, Nicolas Cage is cast as some other douchebag in the gang. But besides the credited actors, the movie is populated by a cast of visual and audio characters who compel the viewer's attention: the looming clocks, the speeding clouds, the creeping shadows of the fire escape.

They speak of time passing with a low-key urgency unknown to any other film. Your life is fleeting, your youth moreso, so make it count, but set aside 90 minutes to watch Rumble Fish.