Friday, Sep 5, 2008
He was one of America's sexiest, saddest and most sensitive movie actors -- until bad women, bad liquor and bad plastic surgery beat him down.
May 15, 2002 | Philip Andre Rourke Jr. was born Sept. 16, 1950, although some reports claim it was 1953 or 1956. He was a tough kid from Schenectady, N.Y.: a boxer who studied acting at the Lee Strasberg school, then went back to boxing, and is presently trying to get back into acting. At his peak, women loved him because he was better than anybody else at smirking in a way that looked like his hard-on gave him terrible emotional pain. Rourke's career is notable for the heady price he paid for his eccentricities, the most expensive of which being that his credibility as an actor was labeled with a scarlet question mark. But this, by and large, is a bad rap.
Good dramatic actors, who need to access a vast color wheel of emotion, are often intolerably volatile, hypersensitive nut jobs in real life. To inhabit characters of dubious artistic value, it is also helpful if they aren't terribly smart. Rourke appears to have both of those qualities; it's an equation that spells temporary magic on-screen and usually results in terrible suffering off-screen.
The same explosive emotionality that attracts Hollywood executives at the beginning of an actor's career is the seed of the actor's own demise when he is inevitably labeled "difficult" by the corporate drones who run the movie business. Personal histrionics, a "difficult" reputation and a bad habit of ridiculously sleazy script choices have overwhelmed Rourke's public image to the point that nobody thinks of him as a serious actor with a wide dramatic range. Although many of his 43 movies are disposable, a look at the defining films of his career with an objective X-ray eye reveals that his acting is a lot better than he got credit for.
Rourke broke through in 1981, Brad-Pitt-in-"Thelma and Louise"-esquely, as an arsonist in the sweaty erotic thriller "Body Heat." His tough-guy posturing and glowering, pretty-boy menace made the Hollywood Beast think he might come in handy for a while.
Rourke hit his early Rourke-ish stride in 1982's "Diner" as Boogie, the inveterate gambler-cum-playboy hairdresser. He doesn't fit in with the overall flavor of the film; all the other actors are on a chatty 78 rpm and Rourke is on a self-consciously heavy 33. He seems to need to be too cool for the movie. As a result, he looks isolated, coming off like the one actor who didn't dine with the other actors and demanded to eat in his own trailer. But he does have a certain gravity.
His pouty lower lip is used to great effect. There is an almost androgynous appeal to him here; he wears more eyeliner than Ellen Barkin. Female audiences went ape for him as a slimy, effeminate cockmaster, and so did the National Society of Film Critics, who gave him a trophy for the role.
When my friend and I were teens in 1983, we saw "Rumble Fish." We had never seen a male movie star the compellingly enigmatic sexual equivalent of Mickey Rourke as "the Motorcycle Boy." We were angsty and thought we were sophisticated. The commercial constructs of teen lust didn't work on us; we were immune to Matt Dillon. But Mickey Rourke pressed all the right teen-heartache buttons -- not the actor so much as the role: a soft-spoken, self-loathing peer leader, poetically depressed, colorblind, half deaf; a torturously sober and intellectual hipster doomed to an ignominious small-town fate. Francis Ford Coppola was in his S.E. Hinton phase and nicely inspired; "Rumble Fish" is an art film for teenagers, and it works.
Time-lapse photography skitters black-and-white clouds fast across the sky to vamping snare drums, to suggest the overabundance of time in youth quickly becoming the lack of time in old age. The sad smile on Rourke's elfin, acne-scarred face reveals that the Motorcycle Boy, with his greasy hair and unfiltered cigarette, intimately knew the secrets of Man's Frailty, and it confined him to the hell of infinite pity. "That's a deep motherfucker, man," says the old black guy in the pool hall (as we angry beatnik girls liquefied in the audience). "He's like ... royalty in exile."
The role, now, is exemplary of the best use of the damaged charm of Mickey Rourke: existential Fonzie. Sensitive, empathetic and sorrowful, with a junkie's whisper-soft voice during even the worst emotional violence.
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