In 1984, Martin Bell made a documentary about homeless teens called Streetwise. It’s one of the ten best films of the 1980s. Maybe one of the five best. Eight years later he followed it up with American Heart. So recently after seeing David Gordon Green’s All the Real Girls, I’ve yet again been severely disappointed by seeing a first-time director follow up a fantastic debut with something considerably less fantastic. Martin Bell is not a Stanley Kubrick, Terrence Malick, James Joyce or even a Thomas Harris. Those eight years haven’t been building anything, except I suppose, a way for Martin Bell to get an entry into making socially conscious TV-movies. I suppose he just really needed work. I sort of feel bad when I make complaints like this. I'm setting a standard for American Heart that is difficult to really match. Malick surpassed Badlands when he made Days of Heaven. Orson Welles did not quite surpass Citizen Kane when he made The Magnificent Ambersons, but he came close enough. Generally, I think that it's not unfair to argue that having an extraordinary first film sets unreasonably high expectations for your next one. All the same, film criticism cannot be fair or just and we must act upon our biases and preconceptions if we are really going to be honest with ourselves. I admire those people who say that they never read any reviews before they see a movie, and hold no thoughts towards the previous work of the filmmakers and actors. But if their claims are true, they're alien to me.

Through a strict definition of the term, American Heart is not an extraordinary movie. Unlike, you know, Bell's own Streetwise, Trainspotting, L.I.E, Kids, Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, Gummo, Sid and Nancy, The Rules of Attraction, Bad Lieutenant, A Clockwork Orange or even Requiem for a Dream. Unlike those films, American Heart is sort of unique in that it doesn't beautify hitting bottom. (And it can be compared to them after all; all those films are about the cult of lowlifes.) The film doesn't hit any of the high notes. It doesn't lactate the sensation that sensation-based filmgoers like myself crave (I'm one of those weirdoes who prefers P.T. Anderson's Magnolia to Altman's Nashville. This is one of the major reasons.) American Heart has three great moments in particular, but they are great only in consideration of content as opposed to greatness by virtue of being amazing images in movement, or great pieces of cinema. There isn't really anything shocking about American Heart, especially if you have seen the films that I had just mentioned. That doesn't make the film cowardly, like that squeaky clean wallow in a mud hole Pay it Forward. Rather, I think that may make it more realistic, honest and possibly even moral. There isn't anything exciting or particularly interesting about living in a cheap hotel where you pay your rent by the week, or being a hustler and petty thief while your father washes office building windows while out on parole. As a matter of fact, it all looks awfully dull. You aren't going to deglamorize this stuff by showing people vomiting. When you're vomiting you can at least feel the stomach acid eating away at your teeth. It can be an exhilarating experience. American Heart doesn't intoxicate us with anything overly visceral and so it works really pretty well at illustrating that it's neither fun nor scary to be in this position.

The first great moment in the film is of a stripper dancing to the Pointer Sisters' "Slow Hand." The second is of a sex party scored by Joan Jett and the Heartbreakers' "Touch Me There." The musical selections are so obvious and gleefully tasteless that they sell us on the scenes (we can believe that strippers would dance to this stuff) and underline the cheapness of the sex that's being sold. American Heart does not, of course, directly comment on any of this, preserving the moment. One of the girls at the sex party is a fifteen-year-old prostitute named Molly. The idea of a fifteen-year-old prostitute is in itself sad, but even sadder is that the last that we see of her is in this sequence, her breasts covered by vertical stripes of necktie, half-enthusiastically dancing for frat boys. She doesn't much like doing any of this, but has already accepted that she has to do it and seems to have learned not to mind so much. Again, the film doesn't seem to milk teenage prostitution for horror. The sex isn't that much different from Streetwise. The girls and young boys wait on a street corner until somebody picks them up. They then just drive off to do it offscreen. The johns are decidedly anonymous, and whatever discomfort they may feel is largely temporal. The only other film that I can recall that makes prostitution look this much like work is the unseen German film L'Amour, L'Argent, L'Amour, where a series of dissolves show a prostitute having sex in the exact same position with only a change of humping bodies. Prostitutes talk about how they are so detached from the act of sex that it's not uncommon for their minds to wonder. This is one of the few films that can illustrate it. Because Streetwise was a documentary however, there's quite a bit more of a weight to the offscreen sex. The pros may be able to be emotionally detached, but we aren't. In a fiction film like this (despite the fact that Bell seems to be using non-actors who haven't had any screen credits before or after American Heart), we can better relate to them. Bell doesn't ever really show us Molly being disturbed about what she is doing, and we never see her actually do any of it. Watching the film, you will remember that she sells her body for money, but you may forget that she is a prostitute. You simply would not identify her with that term.

Like the Penny Lane character in Almost Famous, Molly's whoredom represents both victimhood and sexual adventure for the virginal Nick (Eddie Furlong). Unlike Almost Famous, it seems that the film is more up front about the main attraction being the latter. We can see that it disturbs Nick to see Molly turning tricks, but he doesn't go out of his way to get her to stop. To the degree that he wants to save her, it may very well be so that he can have her to himself. It's the creepy but rational subtext that should have been explored in Travis Bickel's rescue of Jodie Foster's Iris in Taxi Driver. The movie is too detached, about sex specifically, to uphold any charges of misogyny. The film isn't enthusiastic enough to spout hatred or exploit its bodies. Most of the girls in the film are whores, but so are the boys. They see that they can make sex pretty easily and there is a good market for it, and so they go for it. Among the teens, gender lines are blurred. There is one character in the gang of hustlers that Molly is a part of and Nick aspires to get into, whose sex is difficult to identify. There is a drag queen in the group, who like most movie drag queens serves as a flamboyant comic relief. But even her very presence is evidence of the lack of gender-defined boundaries.

Where the film gets somewhat problematic is with Nick's father Jack (Jeff Bridges) and his girlfriend Flo. Flo is a taxi driver who had written letters to Jack while he was in the joint. (Really really awful letters. Jack reads some to us.) I was never completely sure why Flo would write letters to a convicted felon. I know that somebody has to do it, but why her? The movie never quite explains. I'm not sure that Flo really has any real purpose other than to be something that Jack wants to nail. She's a plot device. Her presence helps lead the film to a scene where Jack throws his sleeping son out of the apartment so he can get a little privacy.

The third great moment in the film is of Jack (Jeff Bridges) seeing his son pass by while as he washes the windows of a bank. Having been evicted from their home, Jack has told Nick to get lost, and so Nick does so. Now that he sees him, he tries to tell him to come to Flo's house where they can stay awhile. Jack is also concerned that Nick has been hustling. The premise of the film is that after getting out of jail, Jack doesn't much care to have a relationship with his son. He never knew him, and doesn't much care to know him. For Furlong, it's sort of a reprisal of his role in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, minus the killer cyborgs of course. The difference is that, while ice-cold and lacking in much interest of any emotionally satisfying relationship, the mother in The Terminator raised her son to be the leader of mankind against the terminators. She doesn't much love her son, but she has a relationship with him. Jack doesn't even go that far. When the film begins he hands his kid a twenty and tells him to wait in a cafe for him. Jack then jumps on a bus, hoping to ditch his boy. The meat of the film is Jack's transformation. He learns to love his son. While Jack reveals some anger, mostly frustrated throughout the film, it's this scene that feels the most emotionally charged of the entire film. He makes some embarrassed, desperate strides earlier in an attempt to be a dad, lecturing Nick on not taking his infatuation with Molly too seriously. It's not until the window scene that we realize that he really does have the idea down. The very idea that Jack changes and develops, and is capable of having a loving relationship with his son, is a very optimistic notion. I can easily imagine a world where Jack starts out not giving half a shit and ends up not giving half a shit.

In my high school literature class, I remember my teacher explaining to us that all great literature has characters that change. After all, doesn't the word "drama" itself mean change? That struck me as a crock at the time, and it still does. High school teachers, and in fact all teachers of criticism want to turn it all into a formula. They want to have some sort of measurable objective criteria for greatness. It's not going to work. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the most objective that I can get is that great books are those that deserve to be read and great movies are those that deserve to be seen. Those who purchase DVDs of films and watch them again and again, but won't ever say that they are "great" films, are waffling. That definition will serve nicely in defense to my complaint that American Heart is all content and not much style. That is precisely what is preventing me from seeing it again and again. But I'm overdoing it. If character development is not exactly a necessary criterion for greatness, I will admit that it at least provides the story with a reason for being told. And it feels really good. It tells us something that we want to hear. (The recent Adaptation has a snarky and deliberate third act where the hero grows as a human being and the film develops a message and purpose. First, you are moved and you feel great. The more that you think about it however, the more that you sense the sarcasm. You see how arbitrary this structure is, and how it naturally assumes the best of mankind. What if we really don't adapt?)

Jack has a dream of going to Alaska, where he believes that a con like him can get a fair shake. Obviously, Alaska is to Jack and Nick what Florida was to Joe Buck and Ratzo Rizzo and the ranch with rabbits was to George and Lennie. The characters are given a dream so that they have something to be taken away. Bugs Bunny cartoons have done a very good job of ruining Of Mice and Men for me, but the mechanics of it have long since been so clear to me that I no longer have much use for it. The problem with the Alaska shtick in American Heart is not as much that it makes the ending predictable, which it does, but that it fails to produce very much resonance and meaning. The sad ending is plastic and mechanical. It's walking down the beaten path.

The ending seems to produce an artificial sense of tragedy, whereas the actual tragedy comes in through the meanings that the characters assign to childhood and redemption. When you're young, the film is telling us, you hustle and steal because that is really the best choice that you have. If you're fortunate enough to grow up, you can move beyond that. The film seems to be telling us that Jack is a level above the other adults. Molly's mother is a stripper, and she is able to relate directly to the other kids. Jack's old partner wants to gain a partnership in crime with Nick, and there doesn't seem to be that much unusual about trying to gain a partnership in crime with a fourteen-year-old. In Henry Bromell's Panic, professional hit man Donald Sutherland takes his five year old grandson out to shoot squirrels, a past-time that he had used with his son (William H. Macy) to distance him from the act of killing. In Panic, this was a trespass against Macy. Sutherland was trying to corrupt the little kid. I mean, what the hell is any five-year-old going to learn about shooting? In American Heart, there seems to be a more practical consideration in mind. The guy needs a partner and Nick just happens to be willing and able. The old partner isn't attempting to hurt Jack. Jack after all has spent most of the film showing that he doesn't really reserve any feelings at all for Nick. The old partner is regarded on mostly the same level as Nick. He doesn't exploit the boy with some greater knowledge of the criminal world. When he betrays Nick later in the film, it's the sort of betrayal that you could imagine another fourteen-year-old street criminal would pull. It's not calculated or cruel, but sort of frightened and indifferent towards what happens to Nick.

I don't feel that I could define Jack's ambivalence towards Nick as immaturity. One doesn't have a whole lot of control on their emotional state. And Nick does act as an antagonistic presence towards Jack. It's not just that he is around when he's not wanted; it's that he brings marijuana joints and a stolen pair of high heels into the apartment. There's one instance when Nick lets Molly sleep over, unknown to Jack. The next morning Jack wakes up, hung over with his guitar entangled in his hair to find this fifteen-year-old girl sleeping in his place. At that instant his parole officer knocks on the door to see about a missed meeting. Nick is forcing Jack to relive his old life all over again. Jack realizes that Nick is nothing but trouble and that he should cut him off, but by the end of the film he realizes that he really can't do that. The scene at the bank windows is one of the most poignant, feel-good moments that I've seen in a film. In its own way, it’s an equivalent to Bogart's "Here's looking at you, kid" speech, only not nearly as direct and easy to spot. You feel watching that scene that Jack would gladly risk everything that he has in saving Nick from the life that he has lived. The film peaks at that moment. Everything else in the film leads up to it, everything after it is just smoothing down the characters and plot. It proves for a valuable and very satisfying filmgoing experience, if not exactly transcendent. American Heart is very good drama, but it's not genius and it's not a work of art.