In the early 1980s, I went to the cinema more often than any other period in my life. I had two friends with whom I’d gone to high school and who were both film buffs, and I often joined one or both of them on outings. I have little recollection of most of the movies we saw, but one I’ve always remembered vividly is Baby It’s You.¹ Although I wouldn’t see it a second time until about ten years later, I would have cited it as being near the top of my list of favorite movies.

Directed by John Sayles, Baby It’s You tells the coming-of-age story of charming, ebullient, upper-middle-class Jill Rosen and suave, sharply-dressed, working-class “Sheik” Capadilupo in mid-1960s Trenton, New Jersey. The film is not the trivial exercise in nostalgia that this minimal description might evoke, nor is it an equally trivial teen sex comedy. I’ve since read the studio executives would have been happier had it been either of those things. What they got was something infinitely more nuanced and not anything like the Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Porky’s-like romp for which they were hoping. They even kicked Sayles out of the editing room and had their own cut made – when Sayles threatened to take his name off the film if they released it, they relented and put out his version, but gave it a limited release and no promotion.

Based on a semi-autobiographical story by co-producer Amy Robinson, Sayles’ script is stellar, with dialogue so true it has a Cinéma Vérité-like quality. It – along with Rosanna Arquette’s emotionally-charged and captivating performance as Jill and Vincent Spano’s portrayal of Sheik, by turns cocky, naïve, and explosive – propels Baby It’s You far beyond any formulaic Hollywood fare, teen or otherwise.

Jill and Sheik attend the same high school, and although they share the desire to perform – she on the theater stage and he, less realistically, as a member of the Rat Pack –  their lives are very different. Jill is well-liked by both her peers and her teachers; excels in school; is given a lot of freedom by her supportive parents; and is bound for the college of her choice, Sarah Lawrence – she seems to have the world at her feet. Sheik, on the other hand, hangs out with low-level hoods; was expelled from his previous school; apparently doesn’t attend class much; gets kicked off the basketball team; is doted on by his mother but has a contentious relationship with his father; and has no interest in “signing on for four more years of this garbage” – his options seem limited.

As a teen, I found Sheik’s “bad boy” persona a bit laughable – I now see him as a more sympathetic character. Maybe I’m old enough to have developed more empathy, yet not so old that I’ve forgotten teachers like Mr. McManus – self-important, ill-mannered bullies who deserved the irritation – and my own run-ins with them.

Either despite or because of their differences, Jill and Sheik feel an attraction toward the other, but Jill initially rebuffs his advances – “He looks like he should be selling used cars… or stealing them,” she tells her friend Beth. After Jill gets the lead in the school play, Sheik convinces her to go for a short celebratory ride in his friend’s souped-up car, and soon afterward they start dating.

One day, the couple skips school and takes a trip to the Jersey shore. There, they have a conversation about his future:

“If you don’t go to classes, they’ll kick you out of school.”

“So?”

“... Nobody sings like Sinatra.”

“Who wants to? You think Frank wants to hang around somebody who’s copying his style? He’s got respect for the individual artist.”

“You’re crazy.”

“You don’t think I can do it?”

When Jill responds, “I didn’t say that,” it’s so sweet and supportive, one wants to believe Sheik can actually realize that dream.

Despite such moments, their relationship is fraught with frustrations for both of them – there is no definitive break-up, but after Sheik gets expelled for using an expletive, he doesn’t see or call Jill and she reluctantly goes to the prom with somebody else. When Jill and her date arrive outside the gymnasium, Sheik appears and kisses her on the cheek, telling her, “You won’t be seeing me. Have a nice night.”

Jill graduates in 1967, so by the time she gets to Sarah Lawrence, the times, as the Bard said, they are a-changin’² – Haight-Ashbury in a swirling haze; London in full swing; Vietnam awash in Agent Orange. Jill perms her hair and trades in her pleated skirts and knee socks for hippie threads, but flounders in her new environment – struggling in her classes, not getting cast in productions, having a hard time making friends. “Does she say whether she’s happy there?” her father asks, after her mother reads a less-than-forthcoming letter from Jill.

“It’s hard to tell,” is her reply.

Sheik seems oblivious to the cultural upheaval of the time; he still believes “there’s only three people in the world that matter – Jesus Christ, Frank Sinatra, and me.” At the dive Miami nightclub where he washes dishes, on weekends he does his “act” – lip syncing songs by Sinatra, Jack Jones, and the like for a clientele three or four times his age. When a “real singer” is hired, Sheik storms out of his job; steals a car; and, taking only a roll of bills, his custom-tailored tuxedo, and a couple photographs of Jill he has taped to the wall in his seedy apartment, desperately heads to New York to track her down.

In Baby It’s You, Jill and Sheik, once they have spent some time outside the insular world of high school, realize the ambitions they had there won’t come to fruition as simply as they had thought, if at all. Adult realities encroach on both of them, and how they reconcile those matters with how they have always seen themselves will affect the rest of their lives.

Of the two friends with whom I saw Baby It’s You all those years ago, one of them I occasionally run into around town and it’s always great to see him; the other I haven’t had any contact with for well over twenty-five years. Having graduated from high school the year before we saw the film, we were more-or-less the same age as Jill and Sheik, and I had recently been very unceremoniously dumped by my first girlfriend. Baby It’s You was the perfect love story for me to see at the time, and it continues to resonate until this day. Thanks, Jerry and Chris.

 

¹ Paramount Pictures (1983). The film takes its name from a song I loved, then as now, by The Shirelles, although I was first familiar with The Beatles’ cover, which I knew from the 1965 Capitol album The Early Beatles. In addition to the titular song, the film features a boatload of other great music from the ’60s, along with some Bruce Springsteen songs, one from each of his first four albums, which serve as the soundtrack to the character Sheik’s interior life. Springsteen reportedly loved the film, and, since he owned his own publishing, only charged $1.00 per song for their use. Columbia Records, of course, being a corporation and not a denim-and-leather-clad-working-man’s poet, took their normal payment for the use of the recorded performances.

² Although I can remember hearing “Somebody to Love” and “Incense and Peppermints” on AM radio when they were hits, I was too young to realize there was a turning of the tide; I was not part of Woodstock Nation. Even if I’d been ten or fifteen years older, the suburbs of Sacramento weren’t exactly a hotbed of cultural revolution; through the first or second grade, many boys in my class still sported crewcuts.