BY MIKE LEONARD
Late last summer, a British film reviewer professed his love for Breaking Away, the Academy Award-winning 1979 movie set in Bloomington that will see the 35th anniversary of its premiere in July.
“I like films with a strong sense of place; where the location is almost a character in its own right,” Xan Brooks wrote in The Guardian. “Breaking Away cuts between a Bloomington campus of lavish college buildings and an abandoned quarry out in the woods. It then shows us the link between the two. Without Bloomington, there would be no Breaking Away. But without the quarry, there would be no Bloomington.”
The question about the authenticity of Breaking Away doesn’t seem to do justice to what the heart of the movie was about. It was not a biography or documentary, it was a love letter written by Steve Tesich to his Alma Mater and to the wider context in which his Alma Mater exists. I would expect that Tesich’s sympathies resonated with the outsider; in Breaking Away, it was the Cutters, renamed from the Stoneys. In Tesich’s own life, he came from a bombed out village in Yugoslavia to reside in East Chicago, Indiana. His family eventually came to Bloomington during his formative teenage years where he lived on the periphery of the University and came to study at Indiana University, earning a degree in Russian Literature and wrestling on scholarship. He would go on to ride in the Little 500 in 1962 as an alternate for the Phi Kappa Psi, Fraternity. In doing so, he would cross path’s with Dave Blase.
Tesich changed the last name from Blase to Stoller. He settled for a name that was more believable than the birth name given to this speedy cyclist. Blase felt like an outsider as well, a nerd more precisel until he started biking and found a team with which he experienced success and recognition. Like Dave Stoller, Blase, became fascinated by Italian culture after working with Italians in research collaborations while pursuing a Biology Degree. His love of classical music, European culture and dress would serve to further place him on the fringes of Southern Indiana culture in the 1960s. Maybe, this is why the Stoller family, as portrayed in the movie, seemed inauthentic to some. Tension was certainly portrayed as being present in this family. Much of the tension was directly caused by the father’s perception of his son as rejecting normalcy and being inauthentic to his roots. The tension maintained by Stoller’s perplexed father, patient mother and Stoller himself, still ring true to me today as I struggle to understand the culture in which my teenager is brewing. Once again, this movie was written from the heart rather than with a concern for exact truth.
It is my opinion, that because the coming of age stories that needed to be told–Mike, Dennis, Moocher and Dave all had the– meant so much to the writer. And, because they were folded into a rhapsody on the uniqueness and beauty of our town, Breaking Away does create its own truth; it is a living one that continues to recreate itself to this day.