Looking for projects with more grounded commercial appeal after the neon-hued fantasia of One from the Heart, Francis Ford Coppola adapted an S. E. Hinton novel with a cast filled with actors who would become 1980s heartthrobs. Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze, Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez, C. Thomas Howell, and Rob Lowe bicker, pout, fight, and love in “one of the most overtly aesthetic, art-for-art’s-sake films in Hollywood’s history, a faux-naif Pre-Raphaelite mural in which angels with dirty faces but immaculately pure hearts burn with a hard, gemlike flame” (Gilbert Adair). Coppola deliberately goaded the actors playing the rival Greasers and Socs to foster a realistic hostility onscreen.