Chris turns in a similar but very surprising performance in "Footloose" (1984) --which was, for all intents and purposes, an all-honky version of "Fame" for the Dust Belt. Hickweed teens, livin' in a Christian town where dancin' and rock 'n' roll are illegal, suddenly get their world turned upside down by the slick city ways of skinny-necktie-wearin' Kevin Bacon, and are moved by his charismatic example to turn their backs on Jesus and be carried away by the visceral, crotch-scorching power of Kenny Loggins. Kid Bacon is cast as the epitome of smart-mouthed sexiness and badass cool and says stuff like "Jump back!" in a kind of quasi-Ebonics Cab Calloway drawl when he means to express astonishment. There are a lot of synth drum solos, particularly when Bacon gets really frustrated and upset and has to smoke cigarettes and listen to John Cougar Mellencamp and burst into a whole jazz-dance gymnastic routine at the old mill. Young Sarah Jessica Parker has a featured role; it is funny to see the familiar faces so young, all shiny and bumpy and coated with a layer of subcutaneous baby fat.

Chris Penn plays Willard, a genuine, convincing, cowboy hat and coveralls-wearing dumbfuck whose jaw hangs wide open on its hinges to express naive confusion. He has a richly textured little scene when he, Sarah Jessica, Bacon and the hot preacher's daughter (Lori Singer) go on a double date to a honky-tonk saloon in the next town, so that Bacon can expose his rustic friends to the unreasonable satanic pleasures of two-stepping. Sarah Jessica keeps asking him to dance. He keeps refusing, over and over again, making excuses. Finally Bacon asks him why. He shuffles his feet. He leans over to Bacon's ear.

"I can't dance. At all."

You know he is not joking by the intensity and embarrassment in his delivery -- it was very personal. He might have been saying: "I can't skinny-dip. I only have one testicle." In a series of cutaways between Chris Penn and the dance floor, you see a gorgeously constructed little evolution. His shame, with another beer, becomes seething frustration. Sarah Jessica begins dancing with some other guy. Chris' frustration becomes sneering jealousy. Sarah Jessica is having too good a time, being spun, dipped, disco do-si-do'd. More beer -- Chris gets drunker, surlier -- the testosterone builds to orange-alert levels as he stares a hole through Sarah Jessica's dance partner's cowboy shirt, building up a predatory head of steam. Finally, in a perfectly orchestrated drunken climax, Chris' fists do a nice Kenny Loggins dance on the townie's face. But oh, what an elegant buildup.

But it isn't the most amazing thing about Chris Penn's "Footloose" performance. This would not be a piece of Hollywood Fun Young Dung if the Kevin Bacon character didn't make it his mission to teach Chris Penn how to dance. At the midpoint when this idea is introduced, it is inconceivable that Chris Penn will ever be able to dance. He's just not the jazzy, Bob Fosse, lots-of-unnecessary-arm-movements type of physical guy Kevin Bacon is. You can't see him landing the audition for the film in the first place -- you'd think he would have derided himself too much for looking too gay.

In a montage that makes the viewer's intestines cringe with fear, Bacon teaches Chris how to dance, to (of all things) the gay anthem "Let's Hear It for the Boy." OK -- the guys bust some moves that would make a Broadway chorus boy feel like he'd been appliquéd with a big scarlet Q, but it's kind of adorable, and Chris brings a surprising amount of spirit, integrity and, yes, even some twinkle-toed talent to some truly vigorous and spurting choreography-a-go-go. He really gives it up, even though part of him probably couldn't help but feel that his big brother would never let him pee standing up in the house again. Chris Penn pulls off a phenomenal dramatic arc in "Footloose," in that where he ends up is so mind-blowing, considering where he started, it gives the sensitive viewer the visual equivalent of the bends.

At the peak of his physical gorgeousness, instead of surfing the wave of slobbery teen panty steam created by "Footloose" and becoming a subsidiary young Hollywood Brat Packer, Chris seemed determined to cleanse himself of the bubblegum dancing-boy lightweight stigma and made an interesting choice to take a heavy role in Clint Eastwood's "Pale Rider" (1985) -- an eco-conscious western in that it was made entirely of recycled westerns. While it's a worthless movie that should have been pilloried for riding the razor-thin line between homage and plagiarism ("Shane" and "Yojimbo" were stripped to the bolts for their seminal clichés), Chris plays his nasty Bad Son of the Bad Rich Guy role as though he has personal demons to work out. Though decades younger, he impressively holds his own facing down Clint Eastwood, holding Clint's slitty-eyed mad-dog stare with a nice, insouciant, fuck you, you poncho-wearing old fruit look of his own; he also gets to rape the most monotonous, droney and nasal young brunette actress the screen has seen since Susan Strasberg played the deaf hippie girl in "Psych-Out."

Sean Penn is phenomenal because he never does the most obvious, first-thought thing -- he adds a considered layer of character spin on top of every reaction, such as: He smiles when he's being threatening, because he's amused at the thought of kicking your ass.

OK, that's great, very impressive -- but Chris Penn does this other thing -- he makes you seamlessly believe in characters so much you barely even notice them. It's a more inverted, egoless choice -- he always serves the role instead of serving his career. Sean is a showboat, a scenery chewer; Chris is the opposite -- a stealth bomb.

They do not look comfortable together. One scene in "At Close Range" (1986) -- to my knowledge, the only film they acted together in -- looks particularly forced. They are supposed to be stoned, watching cartoons, laughing together on the couch, but it looks as if they haven't had a whole lot of happy, playful downtime together as brothers -- there seems to be a painful, ugly tension between them. (You can make brash assumptions about what enduring day-to-day life with Sean Penn must be like based on what's happened to the formerly open, beautiful and blithely cheerful face of his wife, Robin Wright.) Another scene features Chris Penn playing a hilarious game of Monopoly with his real-life grandmother, suggesting that life at the Penn compound didn't wholly resemble Dave Pelzer's "A Child Called It."

Around the beginning of the '90s, the beautiful, sad, innocent, Caravaggio teen and gay-idol dancing boy Chris Penn died and a new one began to spring from his ashes -- a hypersensitive, red-faced, manic-depressive tough guy Chris Penn, with a deathly black sense of humor and a propensity to scream a lot like Jackie Gleason.

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