Rumble Fish

Francis Ford Coppola followed The Outsiders with another adaptation of an S. E. Hinton novel, again starring his high-cheekboned, blue-jeaned muse Matt Dillon. A teen film told as Greek myth, shot in a chiaroscuro black and white more befitting John Alton than John Hughes, Rumble Fish stars Dillon as a low-level hood whose older, not wiser, brother Motorcycle Boy (Mickey Rourke) returns to the bars and back alleys of the edge of nowhere they call home. Dennis Hopper costars as their jaded, weathered father. American teen life hypnotically reimagined, the atmospherically alienated Rumble Fish is “an exercise in hallucinatory style” (Richard Corliss).