Bicycle Of Life, by Tom Dinard

The defining scene of my favorite movie takes place when Ray Stoller takes his confused and depressed son, Dave, for a walk around the campus of Indiana University one night. Ray explains to Dave, who has just graduated high school and is wondering whether he will try to get into college or stick with his current job at his dad’s used car lot, that he and men like him spent the majority of their young working lives cutting the limestone that built the stately halls of learning they walk in the shadows of. And even though the buildings might be populated by a good deal of snooty rich kids who don’t pay attention to the lessons taught in those halls by day, at least Dave could bask in the hard-earned knowledge that he was the son of a Bloomington-bred “cutter,” and that is something to cherish and never be ashamed of.

The film is called Breaking Away and was released in 1979. It’s known a lot more for being about cycling, but the bike serves mostly as the two-wheeled vehicle that carries the story of fathers and sons and friendship and love and loneliness amidst the sudden, scary turn from adolescence into adulthood.

I’ve seen the movie many times and own the DVD. I also have the poster in my office. I hadn’t watched it in a while, but I was reminded of it recently when I heard of the death of the film’s director, Peter Yates.

I first thought of the sense of accomplishment Yates must have taken to his grave, knowing for the last thirty-plus years that he had crafted a timeless gem depicting the phenomenon of growing up in America. Yates somehow nailed it even though he was British, and he did it with the help of screenwriter Steve Tesich, who was born in Yugoslavia (now Serbia) and immigrated with his family to the United States at the age of fourteen.

Tesich wrote what he knew, having attended IU and served as an alternate to a cycling team that competed in the Little 500 race that serves as the setting for the climactic scene in Breaking Away and powers what has to be one of the most realistic, expertly filmed and least sappy athletic scenes in the history of cinema.

The brilliance of Breaking Away lies in the nuances of the writing and the methods by which Yates brought it into clear vision.

The first scene shows Dave (played by Dennis Christopher) and his best buddies Mike (Dennis Quaid), Cyril (Daniel Stern) and Moocher (Jackie Earle Haley) in their favorite place — high above the old quarry where their fathers once labored in the sun. But as this film begins, it’s decades later, the huge stone pit is full of water, and the boys take turns lazing in the midday Midwestern heat, trading verbal jabs and yearnings, and diving into the drink from fifty feet up with no concerns for the dangers that might lurk below. It’s an unforgettable opening image followed by many more:

The extended sequence in which Dave drafts off a semi truck on the fifty-mile highway route from Indianapolis back to Bloomington (he’s halfway through what we assume is a common “century” ride workout) to the surging strains of Mendelssohn, hitting sixty miles per hour, shows the joy of filmmaking — not a word is spoken, but the audience is moved we see that Dave is a world-class athlete, something that makes the Little 500 scene believable.

The aching need for a young man to prove himself lurks around every campus corner, from the bowling alley brawl scene in which former class clown Cyril gets his fingers stuck in the holes of the ball, to the frat boy-vs.-Cutters showdown back at the quarry, to Dave’s unlikely and ballsy-beyond-belief Italian serenade of Kat, the top frat boy’s squeeze.

The image of the four friends sitting on a grass berm that overlooks the IU football practice field during one of their pointed and poignant conversations about their impending futures showcases Quaid, then 25, at his career finest, intensity and youthful anger at society and mostly himself burning within him.

And the hug Dave gets from his father after coming home from the crushing, bloody disappointment at the hands of his idols (the Italian Cinzano racing team members who visited Bloomington for an exhibition race but didn’t reciprocate the hospitality shown by the Italian-speaking American kid who invaded their peloton) destroys me every time.

I will watch Breaking Away again tonight and I know I’ll love it again, as I have since I saw it with my own dad when I was nine years old. And since I’m no film writer, I’ll leave it up to Roger Ebert to sum it all up, which he did very well when he first reviewed this film in the Chicago Sun-Times in 1979.

“Breaking Away is a movie to embrace. It’s about people who are complicated but decent, who are optimists but see things realistically, who are fundamentally comic characters but have three full dimensions. It’s about a Middle America we rarely see in the movies, yes, but it’s not corny and it doesn’t condescend.

“Movies like this are hardly ever made at all; when they’re made this well, they’re precious cinematic miracles.”

Rest in peace, Peter Yates.

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