8 / 10
Official trailer
Risky Business is Paul Brickman’s 1983 American comedy and the film that launched Tom Cruise’s career. Cruise plays Joel Goodson, a high-achieving Chicago North Shore teen whose parents leave him alone for a week. His friend Miles persuades him to call an escort service. The call brings Lana, played by Rebecca De Mornay, into his house. Lana brings complications. Brickman wrote the screenplay. Geffen Company produced the film on a budget of approximately 6 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 63 million dollars worldwide. Released in August 1983.
Few teen comedies unsettle me the way Risky Business does. I enjoy the jokes, and what stays with me is how uneasy the film feels, a comedy that seems to suspect it’s a nightmare. It’s an 8 and not higher because the studio bolted on a cheerful ending that the rest of the film spends its running time arguing against.
The film is sharper than its reputation as the underwear-dance movie suggests.
Brickman directs the surface comedy with the textures of a nightmare. The Chicago suburbs are sun-bleached and empty, and the Tangerine Dream score lays down synthesizer atmospheres that don’t sound like comedy at all. The screenplay treats Joel’s pile of disasters as a young man’s introduction to American capitalism instead of a string of situational gags. It’s a strong American comedy of the 1980s and the foundation of Cruise’s career.
The Cruise Performance
Tom Cruise’s performance as Joel Goodson is the foundational work of his entire career. The character works in three distinct tones across the film.
The opening Joel is the anxious high achiever afraid of disappointing his parents. The middle Joel discovers freedom and exploits it with growing confidence. The closing Joel has been reshaped by the experience into someone harder than the opening Joel could have predicted. Cruise traces the transformation across approximately ninety-eight minutes through accumulated behavior.
The underwear dance sequence has acquired cultural standing that exceeds its actual function in the film. The sequence depicts Joel alone in the house, finally relaxed, finally free of parental expectation. The character’s specific physical commitment to the moment captures something about American teenage male anxiety that no expositional treatment could match. The sequence works because Cruise plays it without irony or self-protection. The actor commits fully to depicted private silliness in ways that more guarded performers couldn’t have matched.
I think the dance works because it’s so private. Nobody is watching Joel, he isn’t showing off for anyone, and Cruise throws himself into it with a lack of vanity I find more charming than a lot of his later star turns.
For Writers
Unguarded commitment to private moments produces lasting character work. Cruise’s underwear dance commits without irony. The audience reads the authenticity. Apply this to fiction. Consider whether your characters have private moments where they drop the public performance. Characters who maintain self-protection at all times read as guarded instead of as authentic.
The De Mornay Performance
Rebecca De Mornay’s performance as Lana is counterweight to Cruise’s anxious teen.
The character is older, more controlled, and considerably more dangerous than Joel initially recognizes. De Mornay plays Lana through sustained restraint that the screenplay relies upon for its tonal effects. The audience reads Lana’s interior through observed small choices instead of through stated content.
The performance refuses the obvious romantic tone the situation could have invited. Lana has her own agenda, separate from anything Joel imagines about her, and the film never gives us full access to her interior or her real motives. That withholding is what I admire most in the film. It makes her Joel’s dramatic counterpart and a figure with interests that never line up cleanly with his. De Mornay keeps me guessing right to the end, and I think she’s the most interesting person on screen.
For Writers
Character interiority can be strategically withheld to produce particular dramatic effects. Lana’s withheld interior produces specific tension that full access would have eliminated. Apply this to fiction. Consider whether all your characters need full interior access or whether some work more effectively at strategic distance from the reader’s understanding.
The Tangerine Dream Score
The score by Tangerine Dream creates atmospheric content that conventional comedy scoring wouldn’t have produced.
The German synthesizer band’s textures sit underneath the depicted Chicago suburban scenes with dreamy menace. The Old Time Rock and Roll Bob Seger needle drop becomes the famous moment, but the Tangerine Dream contributions across the film are what set its mood. The atmospheric content tells the audience that the depicted comedy isn’t just comedy.
Tangerine Dream’s score is one of my favorite things about the movie. Those Tangerine Dream synthesizers turn a sunny suburb into something eerie, and I’d take them over the Seger song any day, even though Seger gets all the credit.
Beyond its mood, the score also provides specific structural function.
The synthesizer textures connect Risky Business to the wider cycle of films from the early 1980s that used electronic music to handle similar atmospheric requirements. Thief (1981) by Michael Mann had used Tangerine Dream similarly. The score’s electronic textures place Risky Business in conversation with broader American filmmaking that pop comedy of the period typically avoided.
For Writers
Atmospheric choices can place work in conversation with broader contexts that the immediate genre wouldn’t suggest. Risky Business sounds like a thriller despite being a comedy. The aural tone expands the work’s reach. Apply this to fiction. Consider whether your stylistic choices place your work in conversation with broader contexts or remain confined to the immediate genre conventions.
Craft Note
Brickman’s original screenplay ended with Joel’s college admissions rejection. The studio required a happier ending where Joel gets into Princeton. The compromise ending produces tonal break that the rest of the film doesn’t match. Critical engagement has generally treated the original ending as the better one and the compromise as commercial intrusion. Studio interventions in creative work can produce visible breaks in tone and intent.
Does Risky Business still hold up?
It holds up, and it’s an 8 because the film is so much smarter than it needs to be. Cruise shows the star he’s about to become, De Mornay keeps Lana out of reach, and Tangerine Dream makes a teen comedy sound like a thriller. What costs it is that tacked-on Princeton ending. The studio papered over a film that had earned something harder, and I’d have happily taken Brickman’s rejection ending instead.
