BORN ON THE 4TH OF JULY (1989, dir & co-wri by Oliver Stone, Universal, 144mns, USA)

The great American movie is made more often by accident than intention. So many creative people want to get at the heart of what makes their country their country. But sometimes you want a thing too bad. Too much. And it comes out overambitious and undercooked. Overwrought and underthought.

But every now and then, a movie swings for the fences, to hit that “what does it mean to be ________” home run and connects with the ball.

Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July stars Tom Cruise as real-life Vietnam veteran turned Vietnam protestor Ron Kovic. And it connects with the ball. It launches the ball past the outfielders beyond the bleachers.

This isn’t a perfect movie. Stone’s almost operatic penchant for hitting a theme REALLY hard, cranking the filmmaking up to 11, and beating us over the head with the message jab us in the ribs from time to time. Stone, at his best, really DOES have something important to say and what he has to say is profound and worthwhile. But as an audience member, you do sometimes wish he’d think the thing through in 360 degrees. Here there are moments where the movie threatens to descend into comic book-US establishment BAD! US protest counterculture GOOD! territory.

But it doesn’t. That’s the key. It doesn’t. Stone holds it together until the very end. And very real tears were coming from this viewer’s eyes at the power of the movie.

This may the one movie where Tom Cruise doesn’t do a lot of running.

The movie, based on Kovic’s autobiography by the same name, follows Kovic from wide-eyed teenage do-gooder wanting to serve his country through the horrors of his experience in the Vietnam war to the ultimate wounds that left him paralyzed for life from the chest down to his disillusionment upon his return home and ultimately to his re-found sense of purpose as an anti-war protestor.

Tom Cruise gives, as Tom Cruise always does, 200% and shows that when he wants to, he’s capable of a fully committed dramatic performance that stands shoulder to shoulder with the best of them. Born on the Fourth of July therefore also stands as a kind of testament to the conundrum of Tom Cruise. One of our most charismatic true-believers in the power of movies, Cruise has shied away from dramatic and comedic roles for at least a decade, mostly entrenching himself in the Mission Impossible series. The MI movies are amazing. Full stop. But watching a movie like Fourth makes you greedy for one or two more Tom Cruise left field surprises a la Collateral or Tropic Thunder.

Oliver Stone and his A-team-cameraperson Robert Richardson, editors David Brenner and Joe Hutshing, composer supreme John Williams, assistant director Joseph Reidy, etc-are at the height of their powers here. No scene sticks around too long. Every visual storytelling choice is powerful and strong. John Williams’ score provides the exact binding you need to hold this multi-chaptered story together.

In fact, like Stone’s other masterpiece 1991’s JFK, the cinema grammar of Fourth is a stunning formal triumph that perfectly fits the content.

The movie really is a life told in 5-7 chapters, complete with fades to black at the end of each section. The early pre-Vietnam sequences lean into that late 1980’s/early 1990’s Hollywood “This is a movie damn it!” kind of filmmaking. But it works. When we cut to Vietnam, the camera comes off the crane and into Richardson’s hands so everything is disorienting, dizzying, confused.

For folks who don’t know the story, Kovic was involved in a number of confused firefights during his two tours of duty in Vietnam that left innocent Vietnamese families dead and may have resulted in a friendly fire killing of a fellow soldier that would haunt Kovic the rest of his life.

After Kovic’s paralysis, we get a hellish sequence (almost too much to bear) of his time in underfunded veterans’ hospitals.

Subsequent chapters show Ron’s difficulty acclimating back to a country that had no understanding of what he’d gone through or what he’d seen.

This “fight on a desolate Mexican highway” scene between Willem Dafoe and Tom Cruise is one of the movie’s best and most memorable. Perfect in its balance of drama and real-life dark comedy.

A late movie chapter in Mexico is a stand-out as Ron tries to bury his woes in hedonistic drink and almost kabuki like sessions with sex workers-until he and fellow Vet Willem Dafoe have an existential shouting match on a desolate beach highway.

The biggest surprise is that Kovic’s rebirth as an antiwar protestor only occupies the final fifteen minutes or so of the movie. But that narrative choice makes perfect sense. By the time Ron is protesting the 1972 Republican convention in Miami, Florida, he has come back from hell and discovered his reason for being. Had we not suffered with Ron for the first two hours of the movie, we wouldn’t really get close to understanding why Ron’s evolution from “love it or leave it” flag waving small town patriot to “I love this country and therefore believe we must protest and fight when it’s heading in the wrong direction” patriot is such an important transformation.

This is one of the movie’s greatest strengths. Ron ALWAYS loves his country. Ron ALWAYS wants what’s best for the United States. But he does evolve from an unquestioning adolescent to a fully engaged critically thinking citizen.

Born on the Fourth of July is, in some ways, also a time capsule piece of a certain moment in mainstream American moviemaking. The late 1980’s and almost all of the 1990’s are populated with a kind of “neo-classical” Hollywood style as self-referential to Hollywood’s golden era as Quentin Tarantino movies are self-referential to his love of genre and grindhouse 70’s cinema.

Born on the Fourth of July, is infused with not just a little bit of the overheated “Hollywood-Hollywood” of its moment. In fact Tropic Thunder may be a result of someone saying “What if we took Born on the Fourth of July but had the cast & crew be total idiots; Tom Cruise’s appearance in both movies and Ben Stiller’s Tom Cruise impersonation as Speed Tugmann all seem to validate the same.

But Born on the Fourth of July transcends these periphery carps with its lived understanding of the importance of the experiences it’s showing. Stone after all was a Vietnam Vet who volunteered to fight (just like Ron Kovic), was decorated with many of the military’s top honors including the Purple Heart just like Ron Kovic, and who, like Kovic, came back from the war forever changed.

Watching the movie drives home how drug use, alcoholism, etc rampant in many war vets were clearly a form of triage and self-medication. And just as Stone found deliverance in cinema, so too does Kovic find redemption in activism.

Ron Kovic as anti-war protester only occupies the final fifteen minutes of the movie but the structure is worth the wait.

The movie is a layered novelistic expression of all the contradictions and paradoxes at the heart of many American souls. As citizens of the United States, we somehow understand the country’s ineffable strengths-immigrant diversity, work ethic, ambition, freedom of speech, true belief in democracy. But we also daily wrestle with its manifest albatrosses-national egotism, hypocrisy, greed, narcissism, violence, inequity, nepotistic bias to the rich and powerful.

It’s a hard Scylla and Charabdis to sail through towards an Ithaca we still believe in. A more perfect union. A not yet extinguished ability to change, improve, get closer to the equality of opportunity and welcome to all peoples regardless of race, creed, color, gender, sexual orientation.

At so many points that north star home feels obscured and the route in danger of being lost forever. But then enough people always say “We must get involved. We must fight to find that path again.”

People like Ron Kovic. God willing, people like us.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.