Not very well distributed, this is nonetheless an important movie for those who have been otherwise diligent and want to keep a complete mental record of Sean Penn's haircuts: a field of study known to its more serious scholars as Sean Penn's Coiffography. The thatch in question is straw-colored this time, rather close-cropped around the sides and back, but bushy up top, and usually a bit dishevelled like a field of grain in a tornado, with overall a sort of Huck Finn effect. But beyond -- or more precisely, beneath -- that, Penn remains one of the more serious and intense of his generation of actors, and has here a serious and intense role and delivers a serious and intense performance -- so much so that he seems to have scared poor Christopher Walken in the role of his father (you can tell by the soft flaxen bristles atop his head) into giving a performance so mannered that you're lucky to be able to make out one word per sentence: a sort of vocal blend of Marlon Brando and Muhammad Ali at their respective slurriest. Director James Foley, who heretofore made the execrable Reckless about the universal youthful urge to break out to better things, appears to hope hereby to break out to better things himself, with a fact-based story about a teenager who wants to follow in his gangster father's footsteps and does follow in them for a while and then decides he doesn't want to follow after all. However, all of the standard ornaments of trendy photography -- the smeary colored lights, the smoke, the dust-speckled sunbeams, the lyrical slow-motion, the phases-of-the-moon studio portraiture -- tend to rob the attempts at squalid lowlife of a certain conviction and credibility. Still further -- like the ostentatious Porsches and Foster Grants and Jordaches of a man who actually has succeeded in breaking out to better things -- these visual appurtenances come across in context as really rather snooty, if not even a little nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah. (1986) — Duncan Shepherd