pretty sure this mustache peels off
As a movie, this is pretty awful. As a summary of the life of Steve Prefontaine, it'll do. Jared Leto plays Steve Prefontaine, R. Lee Ermy (that Marines guy) plays his coach and Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman, and Ed O'Neil plays assistant coach Bill Delinger. The movie is in a weird kind of docudrama style that pretty much fails: the majority of the film is standard historical fiction, but there are added "interview" scenes where the actors play their characters as though being interviewed for a documentary, and the film also includes some real historical clips as well as what look to be re-enacted TV clips. It sounded like the 90210 theme song was playing continuously in the background of the movie, except when they're playing some Hendrix or CCR. The old cars and the 70's mustaches are fun to look at.
It's an interesting story, though, and definitely one that deserved to be put in film. Apparently in 1998 there was another movie about Steve Prefontaine called Without Limits. I guess I'll have to watch it sometime, but hopefully not sometime soon. I'd like to see just a straight-up documentary, but maybe it'd be hard to get his personality across in a documentary if there's not enough footage of him lying around.
Despite its best efforts, Prefontaine does manage to be moving at the end, at Steve's funeral (he dies: spoiler). And the running scenes don't seem too bad to me, although I'm not a runner. I'd only recommend this movie to someone who's really interested in Oregon, running, or Steve Prefontaine. Preferably all three. Or Jared Leto, I guess. He's pretty hot in this movie, and takes his shirt off once or twice.
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