Thoughts on Racing with the Moon

On Hulu in October 2021, I watched Racing with the Moon, a 1983 coming of age drama in which Sean Penn and Nicolas Cage play teens in 1942 California who are six weeks away from being shipped off as Marines to fight in WWII. A lot of it is about their loss of innocence, not just with figuring out their relationships with their girlfriends, but also being 17 and fearing the unknown in fighting in the war and not knowing if they will come back alive.

I thought it was decent, I liked that it was very character-driven. Sean Penn is the son of a gravedigger who dates Elizabeth McGovern, who he thinks is rich because she lives in a giant gated mansion but her mother is really the maid, and most of the movie focuses on their relationship, a lot with class struggles and her feeling hesitant to tell the truth. I thought they worked well together onscreen in a cute young love kind of way, and the actors did date for real during this time.

The other part focuses on Nicolas Cage as his drunken goofball friend who gets his girlfriend pregnant and is trying to come up with abortion money. I liked how loopy and offbeat Cage was in this early in his career, where he’s supposed to play the dumb friend but I found him more interesting to watch than Penn, who is fine but I just never liked him much as an actor, his real strengths is as a director showcasing character actors.

There are other early roles for big actors in this, like Crispin Glover as a jerk rich boy antagonizing Penn at his bowling alley job where he and Cage set up the pins in the years before they became mechanized, and Michael Madsen as a war amputee who Penn briefly meets while he accompanies McGovern to her volunteer hospital job. I also read that Dana Carvey was in this, but I wouldn’t know where. Carol Kane has a brief cameo where I think it’s hinted she’s a sex worker, and according to IMDB, Michael Schoeffling had an uncredited role as another amputee solider.

A running thing in this movie is that Penn and Cage like to race along trains and jump onto handles alongside them, and it’s their childhood game that they hold onto even as they know they are leaving their innocent lives for the uncertainty of war. Those parts were sweet, and come full circle at the end.

My favorite sequence was likely the pool hustle scene, where they are trying to get money for the abortion and are conning soldiers in a game of pool. Even if I could figure out where this was going, I still thought it was engaging and liked the tension as a couple of soldiers are catching on to their hustle and Cage is desperately trying to cover for himself and Penn as just regular guys playing a game.

So I thought it was decent overall, it was nice to watch.