Breaking Away (1979) is the very charming story of Dave Stohler, a working-class teen in Bloomington, Indiana, who’s obsessed with competitive cycling (and the Italian cycling team, Cinzano), yet otherwise muddling through his summer with his three best friends while trying to figure out life after high school. Though squarely a lighthearted coming-of-age, Breaking Away enjoys a stellar reputation in the sports film genre—number eight in the American Film Institute’s top ten. The film had a low budget but a (surprisingly) distinct lineage with its director, Peter Yates, known for the greatest chase scene in all of cinema—Steve McQueen behind the wheel of a Mustang GT 390 Fastback careening through the streets of San Francisco in Bullitt (1968).
There’s so much action in this cycling film, you almost don’t notice the themes simmering beneath the surface: the industrial decline of the 1970s, the loss of breadwinner status for men, and thorny issues of class fluidity—themes as relevant today as when the film was released 45 years ago.
This year’s Republican National Convention presented both billionaire Donald Trump and his selection for Vice President, JD Vance, a man so blue-collar the crowd at times chanted “Memaw” to honor Vance’s gun-owning grandmother while the junior senator from Ohio recounted his improbable rise as a native of the economically depressed Butler County. Vance’s family was well-known to the audience from his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which detailed the impact of industrial decline as told through the story of working-class Americans and the struggles of their Rust Belt communities.
Vance’s personal story epitomizes the American Dream and its promise of social and economic mobility and sits atop the current wave in the culture where there’s an open discussion of class itself. The word, the subject, can mean many things. Financial. Social. Perceptions. Psychologist Rob Henderson, whose own memoir Troubled includes “social class” in the subtitle, writes extensively on his experience in the Ivy League and the near insurmountable barricade a student of less means will encounter based on one’s standing. According to Henderson, “there's more to class than just credentials; it's connections, it's mannerisms, habits of mind, who you know, how to conduct yourself and carry yourself in different social contexts.”
This open discourse wasn’t always so. Until recently, there was perhaps no topic more sensitive, more off-limits, than the umbrella term “class.”1 And yet today, class isn’t just a permitted talking point, this is the hot topic and the cultural touchstone of the election cycle.
Trying to understand the forces underlying the 2024 election and the dynamics of the American working-class voter, The New York Times turned to The Real Majority, a book written in 1970.
I’d argue that if you don’t want facts and statistics heaped on you but still seek an understanding of the economic and social forces within blue-collar communities, nowhere is this explored better than in the film, Breaking Away, with its 95% favorable rating on Rotten Tomatoes. When we meet Dave, he’s already distinct from the others in his tight-knit group of high school friends as he pursues his aspirations of training for a professional bicycling team. The film reveals what makes Dave truly distinct, as he mulls over the possibility of attending college.
While the 1970s saw a great deal of disruption from the social movements of the 1960s (civil rights, the sexual revolution, second wave feminism), there was a specific upheaval that was economic and the sudden “decline of the American Dream.” Blue-collar jobs had flourished in the post-war economy and promised financial stability but that changed as entire industries moved out of the country. The decade embodied “the tense, political, working-class rejection of an increasingly unequal society.” Breaking Away deftly skirts tackling the era’s evaporating hope head-on. Outwardly, the film embraces all the hallmarks of the typical “us vs. them” class dynamics, playing out as the scrappy underdog “cutters” (sons of men who worked in local rock quarries) brush up against the upper-class college kids again and again (swimming at the quarry, fighting in the bowling alley). But that isn’t really where class is fully explored in the film.
The film opens with Dave bicycling through the streets and highways of Bloomington, then returning home where he speaks his version of Italian to his parents, an affectation that lands hard on his bewildered dad. There’s more comic interaction—his father happens upon Dave in the bathroom shaving his legs—but this is really a story laser focused on what happens when you move through the social classes. What you gain and what you lose and how you are lost to others, and how deeply Dave’s father is aware of his son’s potential and the cost that could mean to him.
As Rob Henderson observed, class is more than just credentials; it sets up two separate worlds. Those worlds are vividly present even at the University of Indiana, where frat boys drive Mercedes convertibles. There’s the pretty coed Dave pursues who casually announces her planned trip to Europe, in sharp contrast to Dave’s mother who carries her unstamped (and never to be used) passport in her purse, for the sheer pleasure of having it with her.
The possibility of straddling two worlds should he push himself too far, eventually losing a part of himself and distancing himself from the ones he loves most, is the internal conflict for Dave. That was certainly true for Richard Rodriguez, who detailed that struggle in his ground-breaking assessment of his own education as the portal that took him from social disadvantage to full assimilation in mainstream American culture.2 For Rodriguez, who eventually turned his back on academia, that transformation came at too high a cost.
To avoid a similar reality (though one he’ll eventually have to confront), Dave contents himself with his Italian façade, pretending to have an identity that’s both exciting and far removed from Bloomington, Indiana, while never challenging himself with more tangible action that could threaten to distance him from his friends and his parents.
Dave’s dad, however, is clear-eyed on Dave’s potential. The heart of the film is the relationship between Dave and his dad. The breaking away of the title is a traditional rite of passage for young men and their fathers. Sven Birkerts, The Art of Time in Memoir (2007). What is gained and what is lost and how one is lost to others is well known to Dave’s father. Even his own small move years earlier from working in the quarry to owning a used car lot moved him up a notch. What would college mean? The film explores the tension between his fear of losing his son to the next class and his hopes for Dave’s future.
When he takes Dave to visit the quarry where he once worked and describes the blocks of finished stone that went into Bloomington’s downtown office towers, he tells Dave how he learned that not only the buildings, but the very limestone he’d quarried were “too good for us.” He’s talking about the loss of something he’d been intimate with; a rock that he’d cut and molded with his own hands that went on to create a fine building and in the process left him behind. He’s relating his deepest fear about own son.
Class and social standing are multi-faceted and within the film, the themes unfold like nesting dolls. Laced in with the very real challenge Dave faces in taking those first steps away from his family, is another story of how the financial downturn in the 1970s impacted men. The economic pressures coming out of the Rust Belt were felt by both men and women, but the impact to identity was unique to male breadwinners. Today, we talk about the plight of “non-college-educated” men in relation to the male crisis.3
Breaking Away sets it out in the side story of Dave’s friend, Moocher, whose father has moved to Chicago in hopes of finding work. Moocher is also unemployed and at the courthouse for a marriage license, he and his girlfriend can barely scrape together the needed five dollars. That she’s the high earner between them, with a steady job as a cashier, is the slightest nod to the shifting dynamics that arose in the 1970s.
The film leaves the fate of its four young, working-class protagonists open-ended. There’s no clear resolution for the group and that’s part of the film’s realism.
In this newsletter and in my novels, I go back to the 1970s because the changes the decade sparked impact where we are today. With terms like “luxury beliefs” and blue-collar voters and delegates chanting “Memaw” at the RNC, the Rust Belt that emerged in the 1970s is still very much a part of the American fabric. JD Vance, now the region’s most prominent voice, says the thing he would most like to change about the working class isn’t any economic reality, but “the feeling that our choices don’t matter.”
Everyone in Breaking Away matters. They will very much matter to you.
Episode Notes
This Week’s Recommended Viewing
Watch the trailer for Breaking Away
This Week’s Recommended Reading
Some more musings on the Rust Belt
The history of Indiana limestone
This Week’s Recommended Music
"Indiana" by The Samples (on Amazon Music and Spotify)
Just One More Thing
What movies or books from the 1970s tell a story that’s still fresh today?
Bonus question. If you’ve already seen (or on my recommendation have recently watched) Breaking Away, tell me your thoughts.
Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (1983).
Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982).
On the topic of ‘70s films: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DDEI0OAxZ73/?igsh=MWYyNnQyamc2c3c1aQ==
This is reminiscent of my memoir and push and pull of my life growing up very poor and becoming middle class, of meeting Jane who was clearly out of my league. The subtle shifts of loss that sent me backwards in fear. The current state of the world and going against all my LA friends in favor of the working class voters that the Fox viewers have become.