The lasting impact of Risky Business

Happy mid-November — that sweet spot between seasons when the night air turns crisp and simple pleasures return: college basketball, crackling fires, and those first holiday commercials. As in years past, I’ll be sharing more frequent thoughts this month. Hope you’ll stop by to see what’s on my mind

What’s the quintessential 1980s movie?

On my short list of dramas that best capture that decade would have to be Wall Street or Less Than Zero; and as for the comedies, I’d start with Fast Times and Trading Places. (Normally, I’d include just about any John Hughes movie, but it’s fun to go with a “No Hughes!” stipulation just to see what gets cited).

Well before Gordon Gekko declared, “Greed is good,” Tom Cruise’s ambitious North Shore teenager Joel Goodsen gave us a strong contender for the definitive ‘80s film, Risky Business.

This 1983 Paul Brickman comedy perfectly captures Reagan-era materialism, where achievement wasn’t just encouraged, it was demanded. The film nails the tension brewing in suburbia, where kids like Joel struggle to keep pace with their own parents’ country club objectives while also stumbling through their own sexual and social missteps.

At his core, Joel wants what every competitive high-schooler of a certain ’80s stripe wanted: admission to a top college (in this instance, Princeton); the approval of his affluent friends; yet also, the freedom to be someone other than who everyone expects him to be.

With his parents away, Joel takes over the house, blasting Bob Seger on his dad’s off-limits hi-fi and raiding the liquor cabinet for Chivas (diluted with Coca-Cola). After hiring escort Lana (Rebecca De Mornay) and accidentally putting his dad’s Porsche into Lake Michigan, Joel turns the family home into a pop-up brothel to cover the repair bill.

The movie’s iconic moment, when Joel slides across the wood floor in a button-down, tightie-whities and socks, to “Old Time Rock and Roll,” wasn’t just great, improvised cinema; it was a release for a generation of ’80s kids raised on Kaplan SAT prep and college application anxiety rather than the groovy “tune out” messages of a decade previous.

From the steel-and-glass Chicago architecture to Tangerine Dream’s hypnotic, synthesized score, Risky Business remains a brilliant time capsule of ’80s prepster culture. After seeing this movie, you wore your Wayfarers with the Brooks Brothers tweed.

For the 19-year-old me, the film struck a nerve. Great expectations, BMW fantasies and the intoxicating possibility of being bad reflected the decade and that time of life as well — although I didn’t have the money or the exotic friends, and was a straight arrow with little in common with Joel (except for maybe the Topsiders).

Risky Business was actually Tom Cruise’s first leading role and is considered his breakout. The magnetic energy Cruise brings to the Joel character launched him to stardom, and he followed it with All the Right Moves (1983) and then Top Gun (1986) which cemented his status as a leading actor.

His performance here captures the uncertainties of adolescence. He’s still a teenager trying on the tailored appearance of a grown-up but the fit’s all wrong. He isn’t quite sure how to wear it.

A personal favorite snapshot of mine of Joel’s mounting dread occurs as he watches the high school classroom’s analog clock tick backward a minute near the end of the school day — and cracks under the pressure, snapping at his confused teacher and classmates.

And once Joel puts on the black tee and shades with the tweed jacket to promote his party — or, free-enterprise workshop featuring the world’s oldest profession — we also glimpse another, possible future Joel: the born salesman who, with easy charm, “closes” his male schoolmates to attend (and bring cash).

Through my occasional summers navigating the rarefied air of Michigan’s Northport Point enclave (as an outsider), I recognized the movie’s spot-on intersection of privilege and ambition. Joel’s friend Miles’ advice, “Sometimes you gotta say, ‘What the fuck?'” could be considered a defining philosophy.

(Fittingly, the film’s $63.5 million box office return on a modest $6 million budget would have earned “Future Enterprisers” Joel and Miles high marks.)

In Joel we get the ultimate overachiever’s paradox, a high-schooler funding his Ivy League dream… creatively. Rebecca De Mornay as Lana is crucial here. As both femme fatale and fellow free-enterprise entrepreneur, she embodies certain realities of the era: Desire has a cost. Success demands compromise. No matter your standing, someone’s always going to take advantage.

To me what’s so terrific still about Risky Business is how it managed to be both a critique and a celebration of ’80s excess. The movie holds up well today. It nailed the mood and showcased the moment where Ray-Bans and responsibility intersected and a single weekend could feel life-changing.