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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...film spans two decades, beginning on July 4, 1956. Ron Kovic's tenth birthday is the U.S.'s 180th, and his hometown of Massapequa, N.Y., is parading its patriotism down Main Street. Disabled veterans are wheeled out, including one (played by the real Kovic, co-author of the film's screenplay) who flinches at the sound of a firecracker. It must remind him of a war that demands elegies. But young Ron -- too busy watching skyrockets that night to pay attention to a first kiss from his precocious friend Donna -- sees organized gunplay as the short road to manly glory...
...knows only what he has been taught: by his family's suffocatingly pious Catholicism, by the suave belligerence of President Kennedy's Inaugural Address, by his drill sergeant of a high school wrestling coach, by the Marine recruiter looking for a few good men. Men! Ron wants to be one of them, in the nifty new theater called Viet Nam. He hardly has time for a dance at the senior prom -- just a promise of sexual pleasures with sweet Donna (Kyra Sedgwick), deferred till after he has done his duty. After he finds his manhood...
...Cass, 26; and Marian, 28. Dad had to follow the work, and the family followed Dad; young Tommy attended a dozen schools before he was twelve. Cruise learned to adapt. "I'd assume the role of what I thought kids were, what I thought was In. Sports was one way of fitting in. But I was never Mr. All-Star Athlete. It was something that got me out, as opposed to staying home and reading a book. Which I didn't understand anyway...
...first he was vibrant local color, one of the beautiful faces, a hunk for hire. Fast-forward through an early Cruise movie, and you will find him in the corner of the frame, a winsome thing in love with his body, exuding the jock wholesomeness of a baby Christopher Reeve. Superboy. Dozens of such sleek stud puppies pass through Hollywood every year, and in Endless Love (1981) and The Outsiders (1982), Cruise had the chance to scope out his competition: Matt Dillon, Rob Lowe, Ralph Macchio, James Spader, Patrick Swayze, Emilio Estevez, C. Thomas Howell. Usually boy toys come...
Some teen dreams become stars; a few become actors. In one early role, Cruise showed he had the capacity for both. In Taps (1981), where he was up against Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn, he played a military-school cadet who goes picturesquely bonkers and is killed by the National Guard. "It's beautiful, man! Beautiful!" he shouts as he sprays the quad with an orgasm of machine-gun fire. In his first significant film of the '80s, as in his last, Cruise was the gung-ho soldier boy, his body destroyed in the fantasy of combat...