Breaking Away

The coming-of-age story meets the exhausting sports contest in the small, appealing film "Breaking Away," released in 1979. A group of young and restless high school graduates, townies in Bloomington, Ind., takes on privileged college kids of Indiana University in the city's annual Little 500 bicycle race that is a nod to the Indianapolis 500. Dennis Christopher plays the leader of the group, Dave, a young man who is obsessed with everything to do with Italy, the Italian language, European cycling and the beautiful IU student he dubs "Katarina" and works a bit too hard to impress. Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern and Jackie Earle Haley (playing practical Mike, Cyril and quick-tempered Moocher) complete this band of brothers the wealthy guys on campus sneeringly call "cutters," because their working-class fathers toiled in the limestone quarry outside town. Barbara Barrie and Paul Dooley are a delight as Dave's patient mother and car-dealer father.