Verdict
Summary
From director John Sayles and writer Amy Robinson, who based this on her own personal experiences, Baby It’s You hits the right notes and feels more or less very grounded and heartfelt with excellent performances and an intimate sense of time and place. It’s got lots of era-appropriate songs on the soundtrack, while also featuring some songs by Bruce Springsteen that might offset the film’s nostalgic appeal if you’re a purist. Arquette is really radiant in the film, while Spano delivers a pretty raw performance.
Plot:
During the 60’s, a popular high school senior starts dating a two-bit hoodlum whose life is going nowhere.
Review:
A New Jersey high school student named Jill (Rosanna Arquette) is on the fast track for bigger things: She’s popular, has plenty of options, and her hopes and reams hang on a career as an actress, which is plausible because she’s pretty good at that. From out of nowhere, a slick guy in school named Sheik (Vincent Spano) comes on to her and blindsides her with his attention, and she caves when he asks her out on a date. Turns out Sheik is headed for a life of a goombah, working for the local gangsters in Trenton, and he’s got very limited options in life, but he definitely has eyes for Jill. Their relationship is never easy and causes them both heartache and frustrations, and when she moves away to college, he’s left behind, taking a gig as a dishwasher in a nightclub, where he occasionally lip synchs Sinatra songs to bored old folks in the club. While she more or less does her best to blossom in college with her acting and begins a relationship with a fellow student (played by Matthew Modine, whose first film this was), Sheik makes one last ditch effort to win Jill’s heart, but it’s just not in the cards for them to end up together …
From director John Sayles and writer Amy Robinson, who based this on her own personal experiences, Baby It’s You hits the right notes and feels more or less very grounded and heartfelt with excellent performances and an intimate sense of time and place. It’s got lots of era-appropriate songs on the soundtrack, while also featuring some songs by Bruce Springsteen that might offset the film’s nostalgic appeal if you’re a purist. Arquette is really radiant in the film, while Spano delivers a pretty raw performance.
Fun City Editions has just released a brand new Blu-ray of Baby It’s You, and the new 4K scan is sharp and exactly right, measuring up to any high standards. There’s an audio commentary, a number of on-camera interviews with Arquette, Spano, and Modine, as well as Sayles, producer Griffin Dunne, and Amy Robinson. There’s also an image gallery.
