prayer of the rollerboys

what the film does

griffin (corey haim), a young man making his way in a near-future los angeles, is approached by his childhood neighbor gary lee (j. c. mackenzie), now the leader of a white supremacist gang called the rollerboys. the gang rolls through neighborhoods on inline skates, demanding protection money and enforcing a racial caste through violent street ritual. they wear matching white trench coats over their gear, carry automatic weapons, and move in formation. griffin’s younger brother has joined the gang. griffin recruits into the police as an undercover operative and is assigned to infiltrate the rollerboys. he meets casey (patricia arquette), a rollerboy defector who helps him.

the film is built from the same materials as other 1986-to-1991 distopia-for-teenagers pictures, the kind of mid-budget pictures that absorbed the goonies and the breakfast club and the karate kid and tried to cast them in the strange shape of the mall. but it has a harder political edge than most of its cohort. the rollerboys are not a cartoon. they have a doctrine, an initiation rite, and a leader who believes his own doctrine. the film is not subtle about what it is pointing at, and it is not afraid of the violence of the gang’s rituals.

why this one

the canon has 1980s skate and roller pictures on its shelves, and the canon has near-future dystopia on its shelves. this is the one film in the canon that puts both at the same time. it is also the one film in the canon that tries to talk about white supremacist recruitment among teenagers without allegorical hedging. the rollerboys are not a metaphor for something else. they are exactly what they are, and the film is interested in how a young person with a younger brother at risk gets pulled into fighting them.

haim and arquette are both young and good here. arquette is four years out from her breakout in true romance and carries the film when she is on screen. the supporting cast is exactly the kind of professional Southern California character actor corps that made the eighties low-budget scene work. the cinematography is bright and oversaturated and the picture quality is the kind of postwar film-stock-famine tv-movie look that makes the film feel like a warning from a future that never quite arrived but is still recognizable.