Though 50 years have passed since Peter Bogdanovich’s elegiac masterpiece was released, the town of Anarene in 1951 will look familiar to anyone who’s driven through small-town America and witnessed main streets pock-marked by boarded-up businesses, never to return again. What’s mostly striking and important about Sonny, however, is his passivity: why should he care about anything? His generation has inherited a ghost town. He’s a good-natured kid, by and large, unusually sensitive to the vulnerabilities of others, which accounts for his friendship with the intellectually disabled Billy (Sam Bottoms) and for the affair, too, which is rooted as much in pity as misdirected teenage lust. When basketball season rolls around, there’s talk of a 121-14 loss that seems like a new state benchmark for futility, but he’s been skipping most of the practices, on account of his affair with the coach’s wife. He’s a multi-sport athlete, probably only because the school doesn’t have enough boys to fill out the rosters.
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