Film Notes: Streets of Fire

By Kathryn Bailey

Even if you haven’t seen Streets of Fire before, you’ll sense a familiarity by the end of the first song, “Nowhere Fast,” which serves as the soundtrack to a montage of teenagers crossing wet, neon-lit streets to rush to see Ellen Aim and the Attackers. Aim is played by the hypnotic Diane Lane, looking like a slightly older and much more polished version of her character from Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, just one of the many elements that come together to make this film feel simultaneously familiar and like nothing you’ve seen before. This is much of the joy of the film: parsing out the influences and seeing them in unexpected conjunction. Director Walter Hill and his co-writer, Larry Gross, may not have fully realized their shared vision of “a perfect film,” but it’s the swing for the fences that makes this film so exciting to revisit 30 years later, a breath of fresh air among myriad new releases of overworked IP. 

The central concept of the film was to tell a story that felt like it came out of a comic book, with protagonist Tom Cody (Michael Paré) pitted against biker villain Raven Shaddock (Willem Dafoe), backed up (and sometimes foiled by) Ellen’s manager Billy Fish (Rick Moranis) and McCoy, a former soldier like Cody, played (delightfully!) by Amy Madigan. The latter is another one of the choices that makes Streets of Fire stand out: McCoy’s character was written to be a man, but Madigan asked for the part, and the filmmakers were on board. Casting a woman in this neo-noir sidekick role without changing any of the characterization was another bold (for its time) choice allowed by the fact that the film exists in “another time, another place.” 

That otherworldly effect is achieved by meshing 1950s elements with 1980s sensibilities, almost like a sort of proto-cyberpunk spin on Hill’s 1979 adaptation of The Warriors. His self-proclaimed style of “exaggerated realism” is palpable, with the aforementioned wet streets, neon lights, and moody sets captured by cinematographer Andrew Laszlo. The beauty of his photography is meant to be seen on a big screen, so that one can see that, in his words, he was “reproducing the image not true to its facts … enlarging on certain aspects, reducing certain aspects of it.” This balance of restraint and excess is mirrored in the original music written by greats such as Stevie Nicks, Jim Steinman, and Jimmy Iovine. 

One notable exclusion from the film’s soundtrack is Bruce Springsteen’s own “Streets of Fire,” though not for lack of trying: Hill named his film after the song, confident that Springsteen would give them the rights. That assumption turned out to be misplaced, but its replacement – Steinman’s “Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young,” performed by Ellen Aim and her band – serves as the film’s thesis statement, an anthem for those who live for love, or trouble, or both. The pivot is another example of how Streets of Fire defies expectations, just as it defies genre, and now defies its initial misappraisal. In “another time, another place,” Streets of Fire is a hit, and Hill is able to fully realize his neon-drenched dreams of a Tom Cody trilogy. 

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