Crash Course

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

DAYS OF THUNDER

Directed by Tony Scott

Screenplay by Robert Towne

Round and round he goes, motor roaring like -- oh, all right, thunder. Where the unfortunately named Cole Trickle (Tom Cruise) will stop, everyone who has ever seen a race-car movie knows: slamming into a wall; skidding across the infield; ultimately, after the getting of masculine wisdom (hospital stays, love affairs, and rivals suffering gloomy, exemplary fates are the traditional teaching aids), in victory alley.

The nerve of these people, recycling that story. No, the shrewdness of these people. For Days of Thunder offers adolescent males the possibility of a high- speed crash almost every minute. It offers their dates the possibility of a shy, winning Tom Cruise smile on an equal-opportunity basis. The boys get some sober, silly chat about the nature of courage. The girls get to see one of their sex (Nicole Kidman) play doctor with Cruise.

Just to be certain this is the year's perfect school's-out movie, it offers something everyone seems to be looking for these days: an ideal father figure. He designed Cole's car and is his crew chief. His name -- another misfortune -- is Harry Hogge, and he is played by the redoubtable Robert Duvall. Harry is, naturally, stern but forgiving, all business on the track, a free and playful spirit away from it -- as much a fantasy as Cruise's neostud. But Duvall finds an odd shyness in Harry; he doesn't assert goodness, he just kind of, you know, behaves it. Duvall not only grounds his character in reality; he almost succeeds in grounding the whole picture in it as well. Anyway, he gives those grownups who happen to wander in where they are not wanted something to think about.