Mickey Rourke is turning seventy – and it doesn’t matter what he himself says on the subject. Anyone who sees him these days, for example in the interview with Piers Morgan in July, can see very clearly that this age does not suit him and that Mickey Rourke does not agree in a way that he has never agreed with himself and his age Not back then, when he was very young and considered and marketed as one of the greatest talents in American film.
He’s wanted to be a man and grow up since he was fourteen, he’s said in many interviews. But when he played Motorcycle Boy, Matt Dillon’s cool, bold, and unapologetically admired big brother, in Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish in 1983, you could see that it was taking an endless effort to be that cool. And that he would have preferred to have been as young as Matt Dillon. So innocent and so effortlessly handsome.
A year earlier, in Barry Levinson’s wonderful boys’ film Diner, he was six, seven years too old to play the unruly and rather crazy Robert Sheftell – although you could tell he was enjoying the scene in which he was with his girlfriend sitting in the cinema with a bag of popcorn in her lap. And when she reaches in, she’s got her hands on something completely different.
A man and his opposite
And Rourke was perhaps closest to himself in Michael Cimino’s “Year of the Dragon,” where he looked like the whole man had gone mad, with the handsome youthful face, the graying hair to go with it, and the age-old Polish Catholic morals that this one But hero gets stuck in Manhattan. Quentin Tarantino is said to have been so fascinated by the film’s showdown that, almost ten years later, he offered Rourke the role of Butch Coolidge in Pulp Fiction. Rourke turned it down, and so Bruce Willis, who, when he got his first leading role in a movie in Blind Date, had raised the question of whether he was just Mickey Rourke’s younger and somewhat stuffier brother, played in it.
The fact that he was so big in the eighties was probably also due to the fact that in almost every film he appeared twice: as a picture and as his reflection, as a man and as his idea of what a man should be – Rourke, that’s how it felt, always playing for yourself, sometimes against yourself at the same time; and he was always his own best counterpart. Which, since he was mostly at odds with himself, gave his playing the depth and intensity that captivated audiences. And which sometimes made his partners despair. After filming 9 1/2 Weeks, Kim Basinger was asked what it was like to kiss Mickey Rourke: It was like licking a full ashtray.
Alan Parker’s “Angel Heart” is a film whose bluffs and pretenses still make one outraged today, 35 years after its premiere. But Rourke, as the private investigator who suspects that he is investigating himself, remains unforgettable. And it was Parker who later said that he no longer recognized his script in the scenes that Rourke shared here with Robert De Niro: the two of them weren’t just improvising, they were dueling – and seeing it from the viewer’s perspective It doesn’t look like Rourke lost to super heavyweight actor De Niro.
Who is old enough?
But Parker also said that it was difficult and very exhausting to work with him. Those who had to play with him complained that he was unbearable. Rourke himself later said that he could no longer stand himself, that his image of himself and what he actually wanted to be were too far apart. He probably didn’t want to end his career at all, he just needed a few stronger charms, a stronger opponent. He had won his first amateur boxing title at the age of 12 and only started acting after suffering a concussion for a year. Now, at the age of 39, he came back to the boxing ring, let himself be beaten, had his nose broken, his ribs too, and when he stopped doing it again after a few years, most of his beautiful face remained with bumps, which only required several operations made it worse.
It may sound cynical, but it’s also good news that in Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, his comeback in which Rourke played the title role as a variant of himself, behind the scars and swelling, behind swollen eyes and puffy lips, is the skill and the character of Rourke found an all the stronger expression. When this man looks in the mirror, he sees no phantom. It’s irrefutable proof that it exists and that it has a story. Albeit a painful one.
Mickey Rourke is turning seventy and he’s not okay with it, and the least I can wish for him is that he stays with it. He can reconcile when he feels old enough for it.