4 out of 5 stars

Decades before the Tom Cruise brand was solidified—the one now defined by life-and-limb-risking stunt work, baffling TV interviews, and a hell-bent dedication to faith and film—he was just an actor. An actor with a 100-kilowatt smile.

That smile could be made out even under the gradients of black on the poster for Risky Business, which would be Cruise’s breakthrough role. It would not matter if audiences only ever saw Cruise’s face from the nose up—it could be assumed that his toothy grin remained undisturbed beneath.

What makes Risky Business such a pivotal film, though, is that Cruise’s switch from actor to movie star happens on screen. Like Marlon Brando wailing in the streets in his sophomore screen role, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), or Robert Redford riding a bicycle with playful and romantic abandon in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Cruise’s star-making seemed to play out in real-time, a lightning-in-a-bottle moment captured on celluloid for all time. It feels inevitable and undeniable, and it only takes one moment.

The moment in question, in which the actor sports his confident, open-mouthed grin and iconic Ray-Ban sunglasses, functions as a heralding of not just a new star but a new generation of stars: bratty, beautiful, and charming. And perhaps more importantly than any of that, he was (and perhaps still is) defined by his youth. Cruise was just 21 when Risky Business was made, but passes for the 17-year-old that he plays.

Joel Goodsen (Cruise) lives “off the lake” in the affluent village of Glencoe, Illinois. An only child and a hard-working student, Joel’s main focus in life is getting into a good university and trying not to aggravate his strict parents. An act as inoffensive as changing the equaliser on the family’s stereo system is enough to incur his father’s (Nicholas Pryor) wrath.“If you can’t use it properly, you’re not to use it at all”, he chastises. 17 is an age at which you are expected to behave like a 40-year-old but are still treated like a four-year-old. You can’t win.

Joel is also part of an extra-curricular club called Future Enterprisers, which sees students competing with each other to develop businesses. Whoever’s business is most lucrative wins—a cash prize, good grades, scholarships, or maybe a future job in business, or a home in the suburbs, just like his parents.

But the promise of making money is initially underwhelming. “Doesn’t anyone want to accomplish anything, or do we all just want to make money?”, Joel asks his peers. “Money” is the resounding answer. It’ll soon be Joel’s answer too—he just doesn’t know it yet. Risky Business sees Cruise realise that he’s a star, and similarly, it sees idealist Joel realise that he’s a craven little capitalist. All it takes is a little freedom from his parents.

After they leave for a trip, Joel is left with the responsibility of looking after the house. Flights of fancy and dreams about beautiful women are interrupted by the day-to-day minutiae of adult responsibility: trash cans dragged to the curb, flowers watered, and meals prepared. Or, as close to prepared as Joel can manage. His first night alone sees him sitting down with an unthawed TV dinner, a frozen slab of congealed matter that he sucks on like a gravy-flavoured ice pop.

Duty, it turns out, is mind-numbing, so he gets his kicks where he can. He cranks up his father’s stereo and slides around in his socks, an untucked shirt swinging over his bare legs. The scene has since been parodied countless times, but it still fizzes with electric energy. As Cruise dances, kicks and mouths along to Bob Seeger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll”, a kind of new-found freedom for kids on the verge of adulthood was envisioned. The keys to the castle would soon be theirs, and they had the chance not to let themselves sag into the dispassion of their parents.

Elsewhere his imagination runs wild, his sexual hunger taking the form of dreams and fantasies. They always seem to slide into paranoia and shame. Lit by the flashing neon sign in his bedroom window that reads ‘Checks Cashed’ (as if Joel would ever have to work in a liquor shop), he imagines a tryst with a babysitter that descends into a stand-off with his parents and a SWAT team. Who knows which is scarier? “Get off the babysitter,” his father demands through a bullhorn. Even in his wildest dreams, he’s in big trouble. Is indulgence worth the price of being yelled at?

Writer-director Paul Brickman’s screenplay is incisive as it digs into the hysterically overblown neuroses of a 17-year-old. Everything at that age is a delicate balancing act. You have people to impress, parents to please, maturity to prove—none of which are particularly appealing compared with the allure of money, sex, and freedom.

But the former must be kept in check if you want the space to pursue the latter. The tension between business and pleasure, in truth, never really goes away. But you feel it for the first time at 17. The first tastes of adulthood and agency throw everything off balance—hedonism is inevitable.

Joel finds an outlet for his burning desire in the form of an escort whom he calls in the middle of the night. The line between fantasy and reality is shattered—when Lana (Rebecca De Mornay) arrives, the kitchen door blows open and leaves swirl through the room as she and Joel embrace. They make love in armchairs in front of glowing televisions and on staircases lined with childhood pictures of Joel. The rooms are bathed in dramatic nocturnal shadows and adorned with furniture that seems designed with sex in mind.

The next day, Joel is back to being a kid again. He realises he has far undervalued the price of the night and does not have enough to pay Lana. He finds Lana missing when he returns home from the bank, as well as his mother’s prized crystal ‘egg’ (there’s no accounting for the tastes of 1980s suburbanites). Lana has taken it as payment, but Joel needs it back before his parents return. Things only get knottier from there.

As he and his pal Miles (Curtis Armstrong) set out to retrieve the ornament, Joel hardly notices that the stakes are being dramatically raised with each decision he makes. To get back the egg, he takes out his father’s Porsche, a far more precious and expensive object than the one he is after. And when Lana’s pimp, Guido (the ever-brilliant, ever-scummy Joe Pantoliano), pulls a gun, Joel responds as if he is being mildly inconvenienced.

Joel is the kind of kid who works hard and knows that this fact, coupled with his material privileges, will protect him from many of life’s dangers. He may have nightmares of SWAT teams gatecrashing his love life, but when things are truly perilous, he spots an opportunity. He believes that working hard means he gets to make the rules—what 17-year-old doesn’t?—and his newfound taste for pleasure only fuels this belief further.

As Lana, Rebecca De Mornay employs a wise soulfulness. Out on the deep stillness of Lake Michigan, there is darkness, but on the shore, things are just as murky. It is only Lana who can spot where the land ends and the water begins. She knows where the marker lies between the head and the heart, and she knows what’s what—she tells Joel that he and his friends have money. He doesn’t see it that way, but then a 17-year-old with savings bonds and an Ivy League future wouldn’t.

As a young entrepreneur, a budding yuppie, and a dyed-in-the-wool objectifier, Joel sees potential in Lana, as a girlfriend, a lover, and an earner. She sees it in him too, and desperate to break away from Guido, offers to be Joel’s girlfriend and business partner. In a culture of staunch individualism, perhaps the only way to view another person is through the lens of acquisition.

Do they like spending time together? Perhaps. But spending time together is a means to an end. This is to be a mutually beneficial arrangement—she’s looking for someone business-minded to manage her affairs, and he’s a future entrepreneur—what more dependable enterprise is there than the human body?

Lana’s offer is even harder to refuse after Joel’s father’s Porsche ends up at the bottom of Lake Michigan. To pay for the repairs, Joel agrees to be Lana’s temporary pimp. It is out of necessity that he accepts, but sometimes necessity affords us the chance to do something we want to do anyway.

The next day, their joint enterprise is in full swing. Joel spreads the word amongst his friends and shifts from an inexperienced teenager to a slick businessman overnight. He asks one friend to calculate how much he would presumably spend on a date, in the hopes of getting sex at the end of it. He then offers him a cheaper, surer thing—why spend more on a ‘maybe’ when you can spend less on a ‘definitely’? And before you go off to university, don’t you want to gain some sexual experience?

Joel’s grin, suit, and sunglasses sell the fact that the new era of businessman—and the new era of movie star—has arrived. His home becomes a brothel where Lana and her colleagues attract the business of Joel’s peers, each eager to blow their savings on ten minutes of fun. But it’s not sex they’re buying. Nor is it the attention of beautiful women. They’re buying what Joel is selling: himself. Lay down your money and you can be like him—confident, sexy, and in charge. As things spiral out of control, and Guido closes in on the operation, Joel’s façade begins to slip. Is he a businessman? Or is he a kid who played dress-up while his parents were away? In any case, his drive to succeed leads him to darkness. “Was that thing about exploring the dark side bullshit?” he asks his friend. It was, Miles confirms.

Risky Business is a film about aspiration and the hollowness that lies beneath the figureheads that drive our desire. As Joel and Lana succeed, the spiritual emptiness feels ever more cavernous. But Paul Brickman, who directs with an elegant style that seems to mimic the look of 1980s TV commercials, never stops the film to proselytise. After all—there’s a business to be run, and time is money.

It is at once a satire of American commercialism and transactional relationships and a bawdy teen comedy. It’s the first glimpse of Tom Cruise as a movie star, and a reminder of how complex his performances once were. While his current mega-star persona has some appeal, it’s a shame to look back at the dark spark of greed and moral ambiguity that he could possess and realise it has mostly been replaced with a genteel sexlessness.

Risky Business possesses the kind of darkened edge that is present in Cruise’s best work, from Magnolia (1999) to Collateral (2004). It’s also that edge that defines some of the best teen films of the 1980s and beyond, from Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) to Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995). Stylish, iconic, and smarter than it appears on the surface, Risky Business dares to suggest that the teen film need not talk to its target audience like morons. It’s a film nervous about a future of greed and commerce, but with a wry sense of fun as it rides the last train into a bleak future. It seems to ask a simple question: is the pleasure of the ride worth the dread of the destination?

USA | 1983 | 99 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • GERMAN

frame rated divider criterion
Click image to buy through our Amazon affiliate link

4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Special Features:

The new 4K digital restoration was supervised and approved by director Paul Brickman and producer Jon Avnet and looks sumptuous. The level of detail is remarkable—in one shot, for instance, you can glimpse a pack of cigarettes through the material of someone’s shirt pocket, while if you look close enough you can spot the walls moving in the ingenious dream sequence that opens the film. Familiar images seem brand new; just look at the shot where a curtailed Joel dons his sunglasses while raking leaves. It seems to leap from the screen.

The DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio surround sound is engrossing and rich. The film boasts an excellent score from Tangerine Dream, and hearing this mix through a sound bar is like listening to a remastered album—a total treat. Elsewhere, the likes of Muddy Waters and Talking Heads show up on the soundtrack—the needle-drops sound so good and clear that it presented a challenging task not to sing along. A truly revelatory video and audio remaster that made it feel like I was seeing the film for the first time.

  • Audio commentary for the original theatrical release featuring Brickman, Avnet, and actor Tom Cruise.
  • NEW interviews with Avnet and casting director Nancy Klopper. It’s a shame the new interviews didn’t include some of the key players in the film, but these inclusions are still very worthwhile and interesting additions.
  • NEW conversation between editor Richard Chew and film historian Bobbie O’Steen. This is the stronger of the two new features. Chew’s editing is what gives the film its urgency—particularly the memorable train sequence. Hearing him discuss his methods is indispensable for fans of the film, and for anyone who admires editing as an art form in general.
  • The Dream Is Always the Same: The Story of “Risky Business,” a program featuring interviews with Brickman, Avnet, cast members, and others. This is ported over from an older release of the film but is the strongest extra in the package. Though it is only 30 minutes long, the interviews provide anecdotes and insight into the process of making the film, and the impact it had on the cast and crew once it became a major hit.
  • Screen tests with Cruise and actor Rebecca De Mornay. A fun addition, particularly to see the raw energy and charisma radiating from two on-the-rise actors.
  • Trailer.
  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing.
  • PLUS: An essay by film curator and critic Dave Kehr.
  • New cover illustration by Jeremy Enecio.
frame rated divider

Cast & Crew

writer & director: Paul Brickman.
starring: Tom Cruise, Rebecca De Mornay, Joe Pantoliano, Nicholas Pryor, Janet Carroll, Richard Masur, Curtis Armstrong, Bronson Pinchot, Shera Danese, Raphael Sbarge, Bruce A. Young, Kevin Anderson, Nathan Davis, Fern Persons, Anne Lockhart & Megan Mullally.