Can't help myself

Baby It's You

(1983)

A little stunner of a pic that I'd never heard of until recently, written and directed by John Sayles and starring Rosanna Arquette, well into her 20s (this is shortly after her breakthrough in The Executioner's Song) but pitch perfect as a high school senior good girl in middle-class Jersey who wants to go to Sarah Lawrence and be an actor, but who runs into the bad boy she didn't realize she'd been waiting for. (She's equally on target as the much changed college freshman Jill; it's like two related but distinct roles--as was true for many of us making that transition, of course.)

It's sometimes excruciating (not for the weak at heart: Jill getting progressively drunker at a bar; Vincent Spano's Sheik lip-synching to Sinatra at a Miami lounge), almost always genuine. I could do without the final scene, which strikes the one big false note, and as much as I like Springsteen, Jersey or not, his songs don't really belong even as background to a film set in 1967.

If you watch it, keep an eye out for Robert Downey Jr. as Stewart; don't be noticing his name in the end credits like I did and then trying to find him on the DVD, 'cause at that point you're not going to remember any character named Stewart. Poignant moment at the very end of the credits: a dedication "To Dominique," obviously the recently murdered daughter of Griffin Dunne, one of the producers of the film.