Rebel, rebel

James Dean lives again in a riveting, beautiful TNT movie and an uncanny performance from James Franco.

By Joyce Millman

Aug 2, 2001 | Like its title character, TNT's original movie "James Dean" is sad and sexy, riveting and beautiful. In a trim two hours, director Mark Rydell, screenwriter Israel Horovitz and actor James Franco deliver a tender portrait of a troubled genius, and they manage to do it without TV movie triteness or creepy necrophilia.

In his first two movies, "East of Eden" and "Rebel Without a Cause" (he only made one other film, "Giant," before dying in a car wreck at 24), James Dean's powerful, alluring vulnerability brought out something sensually maternal in leading ladies Julie Harris and Natalie Wood. And "James Dean" falls for the soft-spoken actor with the same protective ardor. This is a movie that wraps its arms around its subject; if it can't soothe the pain, at least it can let us see how deep it ran and how brilliantly Dean turned it into art.

Rydell (who knew Dean when they were both students at New York's Actors Studio in the early '50s) and playwright Horovitz have been planning a James Dean biopic for years; Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio were all mentioned for the lead at one time or another. James Franco, who finally won the role, is hardly a household name -- unless your household regularly watched NBC's too-short-lived "Freaks and Geeks." If so, you know that Franco played Daniel Desario, the misunderstod "freak," or stoner, who struggled with secret shame over his bad reputation and poor grades.

Daniel just wanted to get an education and escape from his dead-end life with his sickly father, unemployed brother and bitter mother (in one episode, she taunts him for being "the oldest junior in Michigan"). But adults pegged him as a delinquent. In the series' final episode, Daniel gets busted by guidance counselor Mr. Rosso in the act of setting off a fire alarm; desperate to improve his grades, Daniel was trying to postpone a test he hadn't studied for. Rosso doesn't ask for an explanation, he only mocks him ("Do you think you're the Fonz?"). Daniel replies wearily, "No, sir," but the guidance counselor is only prepared to hear insolence.

Daniel Desario is, of course, a descendant of James Dean -- or rather, of Cal Trask and Jim Stark, the misunderstood teens Dean played in "East of Eden" and "Rebel Without a Cause" (which were both released in 1955, the latter posthumously). James Dean defined modern teenage pain and angst as we know it. And "East of Eden" (directed by Elia Kazan) and "Rebel Without a Cause" (directed by Nicholas Ray) marked a cultural shift in attitudes toward adolescence, which until then had been depicted in movies as just peachy-keen.

Dean's teenagers were emotionally complicated boy-men who vibrated with the promise of dark sexuality and the threat of darker violence. In "East of Eden," an adaptation of John Steinbeck's Cain and Abel tale, Dean's Cal, the "bad" brother, is rejected by his father in favor of the "good" Aron. But it's Cal who becomes the hero at the end. And in "Rebel Without a Cause," we're encouraged to sympathize with Jim and his street-racing, knife-fighting pals, whose anger and alienation are portrayed as the result of bad (or indifferent) parenting.

Franco's wonderfully shaded work in "Freaks and Geeks" was the perfect tuneup to play James Dean. But even those of us who suspected that Franco had a great performance in him couldn't have imagined it would be this great. Franco's Dean doesn't rest on mimicry and makeup, though he has the sharp cheekbones and the slim-hipped slouch to pull it off. Like Judy Davis in her shattering turn as Judy Garland in the recent ABC miniseries, Franco anchors his performance in his subject's childhood trauma. Dean (like Garland) found that he could channel his misery and loneliness into art. But Dean went even further, imprinting his pain on the characters he played, identifying so closely with them that, finally, the line between acting and life was hopelessly, tantalizingly, blurred. He was the ultimate Method actor.

"James Dean" opens with a splendid scene set during the filming of "East of Eden" that nails how out of step the decidedly quirky Dean was with old Hollywood, and how persuasively and cannily he would play Pied Piper in leading movie acting into the new world. On the first day of filming, Dean, wearing Coke-bottle glasses (he had terrible eyesight) and tootling a tune on a recorder, walks up to the straitlaced, rather grand Raymond Massey (Edward Herrmann), who is playing Cal's disapproving father, and gives him a long sizing up. Then he turns to director Elia Kazan (Enrico Colantoni) and drawls, "He can't play my father, he's too old. Get somebody else." When Kazan corners him and tells him he has insulted the great Raymond Massey, Dean replies quietly, "Good. I need him to hate me."

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