There Goes My Baby

Summer school has just let out at Westwood High in Los Angeles, casting the last stragglers from the graduating class of 1965 out into the grown-up world. The movie takes place over the course of that initial post-high school weekend when friends would be together for the last time before embarking on their separate roads into adulthood. Being the summer of '65, the story wants us to see this time period, this generation, as the crossroads between an age of innocence and the new frontier. It was the time between decades, that summer when Watts burst into riotous flames and draft-age boys began hearing the siren call of Vietnam, and girls had nowhere to go for safe, legal abortions. Like the words of the song used as the movie's title, “There goes my baby,” it was a time of transition. The popular Motown and doo-wop music that suffuses the movie was giving way to the poetry of Bob Dylan and Tim Hardin. Pop's Paradise (Pop is played by a crusty Seymour Cassel), the hang-out where this group of kids congregate, is about to be torn down to make way for a new shopping mall. And during this weekend, the local Wolfman Jack-ish deejay is broadcasting his final show live from Pop's before he makes the switch from AM to FM. Structurally, There Goes My Baby will remind you of American Graffiti (and, to some extent, Dazed and Confused in its “school's out for summer, school's out forever” structure). Unfortunately, these reflections will only remind you of what a timeless classic American Graffiti is and what a limp dud There Goes My Baby is. Some of its problem may be that it just tries to accomplish too much. There are too many characters with distinctly separate agendas. They come across as emblematic icons rather than real individuals. Much the same problem is evident in the movie's cultural overview. It pushes historical accuracy by tossing in every aspect of cultural upheaval and then presenting them like a rotating background slide show. Amplifying this narrative sketchiness is the general inexperience of its ensemble cast of young actors, with only Dermot Mulroney and Kelli Williams bringing any real edges to their characters. Such problems certainly contributed to the shelving of There Goes My Baby for a couple of years, though recent organizational shake-ups at parent company Orion are probably more to blame. Director Mutrux has scored in the past with other “youth at the crossroads” movies, the best being American Hot Wax. There Goes My Baby will be of interest to other devotees of this type of storytelling as well as to fans of Sixties period pieces, but the rest should follow the advice of that other Sixties musical anthem and “Turn, Turn, Turn.”