Let’s Hear It For the Boy
In my hometown in Arkansas, the second most popular movie among the youth was Footloose. Star Wars was number one, but that was the same everywhere. Footloose, which was frighteningly close to our own no-dancing town, we turned into our own Rocky Horror Picture Show, with scripted heckles, shouted lines, and the wild girls showing up in red cowboy boots. Our favorite was not Kevin Bacon, but the character Willard, played by Chris Penn.
Footloose was the followup role to another movie that was very popular in my hometown, the Tom Cruise movie All the Right Moves. Chris Penn plays the high school football star who doesn’t go to college after his girlfriend gets pregnant. Tom Cruise played the character he later played in Top Gun and Jerry Maguire, as well as a number of his other films: Self Righteous Rebel.
Several years later, while still a teenager but with my life growing increasingly chaotic and dark, I rented At Close Range from the video store down the street from my parents’ house. The movie’s box looked much like my outlook on life: stark, bleak, and without much hope. After everyone in the house was asleep, I put the movie on and watched while I sipped from a pint of Smirnoff that I kept hidden the sofa crack between drinks. The movie has Sean and Chris Penn as brothers and Christopher Walken as their father. I was captivated by the rural noir tractor-stealing story, and it had Willard in it.
I knew Chris but not Sean Penn. I hadn’t yet seen Sean’s Bad Boys, and had no frame of reference whatsoever for Jeff Spicoli, the pot smoking character from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I didn’t get Spicoli at all. Honestly, I had no idea when I saw it on TV in 1983 what all the pot jokes were, I thought they were smoking cigarettes in his van, and I knew no surfers (Arkansas, remember?) and I had no idea why he was talking like that. But Chris Penn, I knew as “That Guy” from All the Right Moves, and of course, as Willard. Sean won me over with that role, and I was then fans of both brothers.