The Travolta/Cage Project #6 Racing With the Moon (1984) — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

With the handsomely mounted 1984 coming of age drama Racing With the Moon we have officially reached a movie that I would almost assuredly never have seen if I had not very publicly vowed to see and write about every Nicolas Cage and John Travolta movie for the Travolta/Cage podcast and Travolta Cage Project.

Nostalgic 1940s period pieces about young men out to discover themselves and really LIVE before the holy, All-American crucible that was fighting the Nazis in World War II just aren’t my thing even if they do star Sean Penn and Nicolas Cage.

Yet I found myself thoroughly charmed by Racing With the Moon all the same, in no small part because it is a film of such painterly beauty and gorgeous compositions thanks to the fine work of the brilliant cinematographer John Bailey, who has shot some of my all-time favorite films, including The Kid Stays in the Picture, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters and Groundhog Day.

If Cage exploded off the screen at the start of his career, that’s partially because he was in the hands of master craftsmen who knew how to make the handsome young actor look like a golden god.

Like previous Travolta/Cage project subjects Valley Girl and The Best of Times, Cage is introduced here in a way that highlights his sweaty physicality and impressive musculature, that stops just short of wolf-whistling approvingly at how nicely the young Cage filled out a tight, dirty undershirt while busting his ass working to return balls and clean pins at a bowling alley in 1943 small town America alongside Henry “Hopper” Nash (Sean Penn).

You notice things when you commit yourself to watching and writing about every movie an excessively, even sadistically prolific actor has made, kind of how certain themes and patterns kept popping up throughout The Weird Accordion to Al. A mere year and a half into the project I had an epiphany when I realized that a lot of Al’s songs were about either food or television. That changed everything but it wasn’t as powerful a revelation as when I discovered that Al didn’t actually come up with the original melodies for half of his songs, but instead “parodied” pre-existing recordings. Would I have made those kinds of astonishing discoveries had I not pursued such a Herculean endeavor of musical scholarship? Probably not.

On a similar note, having just experienced the dadaist idiocy of The Best of Times, a failed pilot from 1981 that attempted to be a Laugh In for the early 1980s, only with average, everyday children everyone would be able to relate to, like Crispin Glover and Nicolas Cate, I was gob-smacked to discover Glover popping up in Racing With the Moon as a snooty bowler needlessly antagonizing Penn and Glover’s working-class lugs.

Glover doesn’t have much screen time, or much to do but it’s nevertheless neat seeing him reunite with Cage after The Best of Times but before 1991’s Wild at Heart just as I couldn’t help but notice that Nicky is a gung-ho Marine who needlessly needles Navy men and pays a terrible price for his effrontery, just as Cage’s emotionally shattered Marine in Grand Isle gives Buddy guff for being a professional seamen for Uncle Sam.

Is Nicky, Cage’s angry, rage-filled, Navy-hating Marine in Racing With the Moon the grandfather or father of the apoplectic, perpetually pickled Navy-disparaging Jarhead he would go on to play decades later in Grand Isle? Sure? Why not. Let’s just assume that all of Cage’s characters are related, that they inhabited a Cage multi-verse that, to make things even more wondrously confusing, is also part of the Spider-Man multi-verse of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

Cage and Penn play best friends who embody a curiously ubiquitous archetype: strapping young American boys who just can’t wait to be sent overseas so they can die noble deaths for their country.

The small town where Hopper and Nicky live, chase girls, get drunk and work has nothing to compare to the danger, excitement and glory of fighting to save the world from Hitler until Hopper falls hopelessly in love with Caddie Winger (Elizabeth McGovern), an angelic beauty he wrongly assumes is a woman of wealth and breeding and privilege, and not someone who lives in a giant mansion because her mother works as a maid there.

Racing With the Moon was the first produced screenplay of Steve Kloves, who would go on to direct The Fabulous Baker Boys and write Wonder Boys and all but one of the Harry Potter films. Racing With the Moon shares with The Fabulous Baker Boys an unapologetic, swooning romanticism.

A lovely scene where Hopper seductively shows the girl of his dreams how to play “Chopsticks” on the piano anticipates the famously scorching piano-based eroticism of The Fabulous Baker Boys while a memorable set-piece where Hopper and Nicky try to raise money to pay for an abortion by challenging soldiers to a game of Quidditch presages Kloves’ later work adaptation the fantastical novels of J.K Rowling, as does the fairly sizable role Albus Dumbledore plays in the proceedings.

Hopper will do anything to have a dream girl he only thinks is way out of his league, a “Gatsby Girl” in the film’s parlance. He’s a true romantic who has discovered in the beautiful ticket ticker something and someone worthy of his single-minded devotion and intensity.

Despite the prickly nature of Penn’s persona and image he makes for a surprisingly organic and convincing romantic lead and his romantic and sexual chemistry with the endlessly and effortlessly charming McGovern is nothing short of volcanic.

Cage, to me, goes through Racing With the Moon with the mad, fatalistic, innately doomed energy of someone cursed not to make it to the end credits. He’s too intense. He’s too raw. He’s too obsessed with getting an opportunity to prove himself on the battlefield. He drinks way too much. Over the course of the film he never stops taking foolish, dangerous, unnecessary chances that get him hurt but also hurt the people around him, the people that he loves.

To put things in Scorsese terms, he’s a hot-headed Joe Pesci to Penn’s smolderingly intense Robert De Niro.

Cage as Nicky struck me as a trusty and time-worn archetype: the wild and self-destructive friend whose all too predictable death instills in the protagonist a greater sense of life’s fragility and sacredness and raises the emotional stakes for the third act.

Yet a curious thing happens to Nicky in Racing With the Moon: he doesn’t die. It sure as shit feels like he’s on the verge of a very tragic, very heartstrings-tugging death when he’s taking unwise chances around speeding trains or angry military men but he somehow manages to evade a violent, early, preventable death that seems inevitable.

Nicky survives long enough to get his chance to die for Uncle Sam. Others end up paying a price for his recklessness when he gets a girl pregnant and then must scour the town for the one hundred and fifty dollars it will cost to get an abortion. For an American film of the 1980s, Racing With the Moon has a refreshingly and unexpectedly non-judgmental attitude towards abortion.

In the kind of detail that sets the film apart, even Hopper can’t help but notice that his best friend couldn’t even be bothered to open the car door for his partner after she’d just had an abortion in a seedy trailer. Racing With the Moon judges Nicky and judges him harshly for his inability to assume responsibility for his actions.

Nicky wants desperately to be a man, to prove himself as a man, but his conception of masculinity is all cartoon jarhead glamour and macho attitude. He doesn’t realize that sometimes being a man, really being a man, involves holding onto a woman’s hand while she gets an abortion, looking her in the eyes and assuring her that despite what she might be feeling at the moment, everything will be alright.

Like Valley Girl, Racing With the Moon is a winningly grown-up exploration of coming of age and falling in love that understands the complicated, tricky psychological terrain of teen life, the heightened emotions and romantic melodrama and beauty and fear and obsession.

It’s a lovely little sleeper, smartly and sensitively written, gorgeously shot, nicely directed by Richard Benjamin (following up his first and best film as a director, the similarly nostalgia-rich period 1982 piece My Favorite Year) and masterfully acted by some extraordinary talents at the very beginnings of auspicious careers but I have a hard time recommending it to Cage fans because its admirable qualities are very un-Nicolas Cage qualities. Heck, the fact that it is a quality motion picture at all separates it from most of the Cage movies that I love, as does the fact that it’s handsomely mounted and elegantly assembled rather than, you know, next level bonkers and completely insane.

So check out Racing With the Moon if you must but be aware that it’s a legitimately good movie full of artistry and gallery-ready images and not Cage’s usual fare.

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