Myth mounted a motorcycle in Cocteau's Orpheus and rode straight into Coppola's Rumble Fish. Here, teenage toughs strut in stark isolation, suspended in a surreal atmosphere where loss is as palpable as the scudding clouds overhead. David Thomson reports: "The fusion of Tulsa heat waves and the fever dreams of adolescence is a rhapsody to fraternity, in particular to the triangle of two brothers and their broken father-Matt Dillon, Mickey Rourke and Dennis Hopper." Rusty-James (Dillon) is a lower-class hood who lives in the cool shadow of his legendary but absent brother, Motorcycle Boy (Rourke). Upon the return of his older sibling, the heroic implodes: now a laconic loner, Motorcycle Boy has seen the future and it's a Harley with a blown piston. Hopper, in an unusually restrained performance, is the scraggly, besotted father of these two rough-and-tumble diehards. In a billiard parlor operated by Tom Waits, the three are briefly united. It is a haunting, charged moment, filled with the creaking of craggy hearts, and elevated by the wordless grunting of Methodone Acting at its best. Coppola has yanked Rumble Fish out of the traditional storytelling mode of American film and made a highly intuitive, boldly visual statement. Shot in chiaroscuro black and white, the film is strangely off-balance-a gang fight tingles with devilish choreography, Siamese fighting fish languish in their exotic poses, a giant clock without hands marks the frozen moment. Coppola's Rumble Fish is not a bratty teen film, but a grand attempt to forge mythos out of the yearnings of youth.