Hooray for Hollyweird! ‘Breaking Away’ is simply excellent

FloridaGator80

We’ve begun summer of 2025 in earnest and I’m continuing the fractured phrase: Hooray for Hollyweird! Most of us love movies and I enjoy recommending what you should watch on any given day. So, Hooray for Hollyweird … and for today’s recommendation, let’s go with the coming-of-age classic “Breaking Away.” It’s a coming-of-age story, but it is also a “bicycle” movie.

With “Breaking Away” you get the story of four teenagers struggling with life. One, our hero, loves bicycling and is a fanatic and very good and pretends to be Italian because they’re the best bicycle racers at the time; another is a former jock who’ll never surpass his high school accomplishments; another is getting married very young; and the last is the group’s least intelligent member, but a good friend and a good person.

The boys are all sons of men who worked as stone cutters in the former Indiana quarries. They call themselves “cutters,” even though they never worked cutting stone. They use the name to separate themselves from the college students, whom they see as rich miscreants. Yes, in “Breaking Away” it’s the hoi polloi versus the hoity-toity and the film overcomes this potentially stereotype through wonderful storytelling.

Director Peter Yates spins the tale well and uses the bicycling element as a thread that becomes a rope to bring it all together at Indiana University’s “Little 500” bicycle race as the ultimate showdown between the frat boys and the “cutters.” The race is an homage to the world-renowned Indy 500 car race and it is still held today.

Of course, all the boys learn about themselves, but our hero (“Dave Stohler” played by Dennis Christopher) has the toughest route to travel. He gets sucker-punched by the egotistical Italian bicycle racing team as he shows that he’s their equal and they don’t expect that from an American (after all, he practices by drafting 18-wheeler trucks on the nearby interstate); and he struggles through a relationship not only with his parents, but also with a first love, who is a college student.

You’ll get a couple of surprises along the way watching “Breaking Away,” with the biggest arriving near the end of the film and it’s not which team wins the “big race.”

All-in-all, you can’t miss with “Breaking Away.” We’re in a streaming day and you can easily find “Breaking Away” … and then you’ll definitely say … “Hooray for Hollyweird!”

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Actors: Jennifer Aniston | Charles Bronson | Pierce Brosnan | Gary Busey | Michael Caine
Chevy Chase | Sean Connery | Jamie Lee Curtis | Matt Damon | Robert De Niro
Leonardo DiCaprio | Clint Eastwood | Gene Hackman | Téa Leoni | Steve Martin
Tim Matheson | Steve McQueen | Roger Moore | Rick Moranis | Eddie Murphy
Chuck Norris | Brad Pitt | Dennis Quaid | Robert Redford | Burt Reynolds | Rene Russo
Arnold Schwarzenegger | Frank Sinatra | Jason Statham | Donald Sutherland | Billy Bob Thornton
Directors: William Friedkin | Sam Peckinpah | Sydney Pollack | Peter Yates

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