Before Tom Cruise gained stardom following the theatrical release of the 1983 teen comedy film Risky Business, the year’s sleeper hit, Cruise traveled to the then heart of steel country in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to star in the sports drama film All the Right Moves, in which he plays Stefen “Stef” Djordjevic, a talented high-school football player who seeks a college football scholarship to escape his economically depressed hometown.
While All the Right Moves features entertaining football scenes, All the Right Moves, like all good sports movies, primarily utilizes football as a vessel through which the film explores the aspirations and fears of its characters. Just as football represents a means of escapism for the residents of the film’s fictional steel mill town, football is the only source of hope for Stef to avoid spending the rest of his life working in a steel mill alongside his brother and father.
All the Right Moves provided Cruise with his first dramatic leading-man role, and Cruise does an excellent job, especially in terms of showing how Stef’s relationship with football is inextricably tied to every other aspect of his life, especially his future, in which he merely wants to turn his gift for football into a better life for himself.
When All the Right Moves was filmed in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, which previously served as the filming location for the 1977 sports comedy Slap Shot, the local steel industry was on its last legs before collapsing in 1984. The real-life economic depression that the cast and crew of All the Right Moves, which is set in the fictional town of Ampipe, encountered among the town’s residents is vividly presented in the film, particularly in terms of how virtually all the film’s characters, led by Tom Cruise’s Stef, seek a proverbial ticket out of this dead-end environment.
Besides Stef, whose ticket out of town is a college football scholarship, Stef’s strong-willed coach, Nickerson, played by Craig T. Nelson, hopes to get a college coaching position, while Stef’s girlfriend, Lisa, played by Lea Thompson, realizes that her relationship with Stef is unlikely to survive if he leaves town. In one of the film’s most powerful scenes, Stef’s closest high-school friend and teammate, Brian, played by Christopher Penn, tells Stef that Brian’s girlfriend is pregnant, thus forcing Brian to forego a prime college scholarship.
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All the Right Moves does a very effective job of showing how people in small towns attach much of their self-identity to the fortunes of their local sports teams, which symbolize a town’s sense of pride. This was highlighted in Roger Ebert’s 1983 review of All the Right Moves. Ebert wrote:
“I started [in] newspapers as a sportswriter, covering local high-school teams. That was a long time ago, and I had almost forgotten, until I saw
All the Right Moves
, how desperately important every game seemed at the time. When the team members and the fans are all teenagers, and when a school victory reflects in a significant way upon your own feelings of worth, when “We won!” means that we won, a football game can take on aspects of Greek tragedy.”
All the Right Moves Avoids Sports Movie Predictability
The honest approach that All the Right Moves takes with its characters and story is reflected in Tom Cruise’s character, Stef, who, instead of occupying the flashy football positions of quarterback or running back, is a defensive back, which is the kind of position that the diminutive Cruise would have likely played in real life.
This sense of realism also exists in Stef’s perception of his football-playing potential. When a college recruiter tries to entice him by suggesting the possibility of Stef playing in the NFL, he observes that while he’s confident that he can be successful as a college player, he doesn’t think that the NFL has any need for a smallish white defensive back. Stef’s primary purpose for playing college football is to leverage his football prowess into a career as an electrical engineer.
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Instead of ending with the standard big game, the closing scenes of All the Right Moves involve the emotional fallout from the big game, in which Stef’s Ampipe team loses in heartbreaking fashion after their running back fumbles the ball in the game’s dying seconds. Following the game, Stef gets into an argument with his coach, Nickerson, who promptly kicks Stef off the team. Later, Stef joins several angry Ampipe fans in vandalizing Nickerson’s house, only to be seen by Nickerson, who subsequently blackballs Stef among college recruiters. All the Right Moves resolves this conflict through emotion and honesty, as Stef engages in an angry confrontation with Nickerson, whom he accuses of being a hypocrite and having a god complex. “Nickerson, you are not God,” Stef says. “You’re just a typing teacher.”
All the Right Moves Is Tom Cruise’s Lowest-Grossing Feature Starring Vehicle
Despite being released approximately two months after the acclaimed Risky Business and receiving generally positive critical reviews, All the Right Moves, which grossed just over $17 million at the box office, was a relative box-office disappointment. Excluding the effects-driven 1985 fantasy film Legend, which under-performed All the Right Moves at the box office, All the Right Moves remains the lowest-grossing starring vehicle of Tom Cruise’s career.
The back-to-back box-office failures of All the Right Moves and Legend created a lull in Cruise’s career, which was, of course, revitalized in 1986 with the blockbuster success of Top Gun. While the failure of Legend was attributable to how Cruise’s presence was drowned out by that film’s superfluous technical credits, All the Right Moves features one of Cruise’s best early performances and is worthy of rediscovery and reappraisal. All the Right Moves is available to rent on Apple TV.
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