Risky Business (1983)

Official trailer

Risky Business is Paul Brickman’s 1983 American comedy and the film that launched Tom Cruise’s career. Cruise plays Joel Goodsen, 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 Goodsen 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 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.

The De Mornay Performance

Rebecca De Mornay’s performance as Lana is the 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.

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.

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.

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