At the Head of the Pack

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

The hero doesn't win the big race. Instead, he dies young and absurdly in an auto accident, leaving his highest promise unfulfilled. No wonder Warner Bros. has been dithering over the release of Without Limits for something like a year and a half. In that story line it's kind of hard to find the thing all sports movies implicitly promise--a triumph of the human spirit.

Kind of hard to find much conventional commercial promise in the movie either. Directed and co-written (with Kenny Moore) by Robert Towne, it stars Billy Crudup and Donald Sutherland, not exactly guys you can count on to open a picture. Worse, it follows by a mere two years another movie about its protagonist, the legendary distance runner Steve Prefontaine, which flopped miserably. Without Limits, which is a very good movie, will require a stroke of marketing genius to succeed. Or an unusual effort at understanding--a willingness by the audience to set aside generic expectations and engage the movie on its own terms.

This effort has to begin with the recognition that this is only nominally a sports movie. Yes, there was a time, more than a quarter-century ago, when Prefontaine held the American record in every distance from 2,000 to 10,000 m, when his bold front-running style and his self-dramatizing manner made him running's version of a rock star. And, yes, Towne conveys the exhilaration and exhaustion of high-level competition with unprecedented realism and intimacy.

But if Towne the director has a shrewd and patient eye for the small, telling tics of human behavior, Towne the writer says all his best work--which includes the classic Chinatown--is "about a man's relationship to his profession, the willingness to put everything into doing one single thing well," which he finds "purifying and thrilling."

Clearly, Prefontaine, whom Crudup plays with cool ferocity, is his kind of guy. A knothead and a hothead who insisted that "a race is a work of art," he also liked to say he'd rather lose in a way that was aesthetically pleasing to him than win by more closely calculated means.

This put him in conflict with his coach, the almost equally legendary Bill Bowerman (Sutherland), no mean athletic aesthetician himself. He's presented as a more forgiving and gently eccentric kind of obsessive, disapproving of his pupil's stubborn individuality but also watchfully guarding a passion for excellence that matches his own. Theirs is a marvelously subtle wrangle: Prefontaine ran Bowerman's race in the 5,000 m at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and was beaten; but it was Bowerman who brought him back from self-pity (and maybe self-destruction) and onto the comeback trail before Prefontaine was killed.

Whether he would have won at the next Olympics, we'll never know. What we do know is that Towne, a man of ruefully romantic temperament, has found a soulmate in Steve Prefontaine. In an article he once wrote, Towne made an implicit analogy between writing and running. Both involve a rebellious effort to exceed the limits God places on your talent; both demand, as you settle into the starting blocks, an acceptance of whatever fate he whimsically decrees. One hopes that Without Limits, seemingly boxed in at the start, breaks free and scores an upset that is, yes, "purifying and thrilling" for the uncompromising spirit it sweetly celebrates.

--By Richard Schickel