Five Friends

By RICHARD CORLISS

DINER Directed and Written by Barry Levinson

Boys and girls together? Not in Baltimore, not in the late '50s. The two sexes were different species then, speaking different languages, eyeing each other warily through a chain-link fence of chromosomes. For guys, girls were the ideal, the adversary, the enigma. Who knows what they want? Marriage, maybe, but not sex. This made courtship a frustrating series of skirmishes that could end only in conquest or stalemate, never detente. Who knows how to talk to them? A young man's sensible priorities-- pro football, rhythm and blues, hanging out--were adolescent irrelevancies to his date, or even his mate. Then again, why bother? "You wanna talk," philosophizes one fellow in this terrific little comedy, "you always got the guys at the diner."

Like other social comedies that brighten critics' lives about once a year (Breaking Away, Melvin and Howard, Atlantic City), Diner is a microscope--not a megascope--movie, as admirable for what it avoids as for what it accomplishes. Writer-Director Barry Levinson looks back on the Eisenhower era with affectionate understanding, and without straining for apocalyptic climaxes or Zeitgeist generalizations. He is content to observe these five guys who congregate late each night at the Fells-Point Diner, content to display them in all their modest, wisecracking, friend-loving glory. An evening at Diner is like a night at the diner. The air is heavy with cigarette smoke and camaraderie, and the menu offers a banquet of fast food and funny talk: French fries and gravy, with a side order of sugar and Coke--and hold the maturity.

So here they sit, just past college age, at the crossroads between Now and Nowhere, waiting for answers to their two big questions: Marriage or not? And then what? Shrevie (Daniel Stern) is already married, to a girl who tries desperately to comprehend his passion for music and his rage for order--"How could you file my James Brown record under J?" Eddie (Steve Guttenberg) is ready to get married, with few qualms and one small condition: that his fiancee pass the world's toughest football quiz. Boogie (Mickey Rourke) will never be married: he has too much fun playing the sensitive stud and limping through life with one foot in the underworld. Fenwick (Kevin Bacon) is beyond marriage: proto-hip and self-destructive, he seems to be waiting for the '60s to explode around him. Billy (Timothy Daly) wants to get married--but his pregnant girlfriend is more intent on a career in television. It may take Billy the better part of two decades to catch up with her.

The film is wonderfully cast and played, right down to the bit player (Ralph Tabakin) who shops suspiciously for a TV set: "I saw Bananzo and it was not for me. The Ponderosa looked faked." Stern and Bacon have refreshingly un-movie faces--the one sweet-souled and long-nosed, the other feral, cheeky and forthrightly Irish--fronting outsize talents. But the prize in this gallery is Mickey Rourke, who made a strong impression in Body Heat and assumes command of Diner whenever he is onscreen. With a face as handsome as it is streetwise, and a smile that manages to be both shy and cunning, Rourke has the potential of a young Jack Nicholson. However bright his star may shine, though, he could have trouble finding a movie that offers him as sexy a role--or the audience as much unforced pleasure--as this small gem.

--By Richard Corliss

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