Breaking Away

1979’s “Breaking Away”, directed by Peter Yates.

Starring Dennis Christopher, Daniel Stern, Dennis Quaid, Jackie Earle Haley, John Ashton, Barbara Barrie, Paul Dooley, and Robyn Douglass.

Winner of an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Director (Yates), Best Supporting Actress (Barrie), and Best Music.

We meet a quartet of young men, lazing away the idle days of summer in Bloomington, Indiana. They have recently graduated from high school, and find themselves for the most part without a plan for what comes next. However, protagonist Dennis Christopher’s character knows what he wants to do: cycle constantly on his bike, and pretend to be as Italian as possible, much to the consternation of his not Italian used car salesman father (Paul Dooley). Christopher wants to train and compete in an upcoming bike race, and as he obsessively trains, he meets up with a college beauty (Douglass) whom he does his best to woo with his fake Italian accent and faker story about being a student at the college. With none of the group actually attending, it takes some fibbing to make the ruse work. While the other 3 boys spend a great deal of time quitting menial jobs, their favourite place to spend the summer is the river quarry where the majority of the kid’s parents used to work. We learn that on top of having a race to win, and being otherwise shiftless, that the young men have to deal with being “cutters”, a derogatory term for the tradespeople who originally built the town, instead of attending the college and getting more cosmopolitan employment afterwards. The boys will learn almost as much about class warfare as they do cycling for the big race.

I think we can all remember the spectre of that summer where you graduate high school, and feel conflicted at the upcoming freedom, as you wonder what comes next in your life. Here, the boys are so free spirited that the very idea of punching the clock (figuratively) offends them. Christopher is singularly focused on both his cycling race and his quest to be Italian (even naming his cat, Fellini), but the script does a funny thing. It shows us a small town world with almost cartoon like characters, but downshifts quickly to show how its life’s disappointments and setbacks that give us perspective and meaning to the bigger picture, through it’s flesh and blood characters. Take our group of young men, inseparable and life long friends. We see their various personalities, with Quaid’s bitterness over not being able to be offered a football scholarship, or Stern’s character not wanting to even set goals lest he be disappointed by them and just wanting to hang with the boys the rest of his life, or Earle Haley’s small man wanting to commit to a woman and not let people a foot taller push him around, and we know that over the years their paths are very likely going to divert from each other as life inevitably does. Here, their paths stay intertwined throughout the movie, until the climatic race, featuring a great deal of panache from director Yates. It’s easy to see that it’s the same guy who made “Bullit”, as the race is exciting and gripping. But “BA”’s greatest strength is the breaking away from the static of one’s life. Perhaps the greatest cycling movie of all time, it’s a feel good crowd pleaser that’s sweet without being cloying, and unexpectedly sneaks up on you, as you thought it was in the middle of the pack until you realize it's jockeying for first place.

4.5/5

Trailer: Click Here.