MOVIE REVIEW : Another Coming of Age With ‘My Baby’

The best coming-of-age ‘60s period pieces--”American Graffiti” foremost among them--typically tend toward teen high jinks, with just a chaser of social portent.

Floyd Mutrux’s Malibu-set “There Goes My Baby” loosely fits these genre parameters, but, despite a soundtrack chockablock full of guileless pop, it’s all portent and no high jinks. The foreshadowing is so thick you could surf on it.

Among song titles yet unco-opted by the movies, “Bad Moon Rising” would have been more fitting, or maybe “Kind of a Drag.” This surprisingly dour teen drama bounces between eight recent graduates from the fanciful Westwood High class of ‘65, characters defined only by what they worry about, or should. We know we’re in for lots of ironic bodefulness when the blond and buffed Stick (Rick Schroder), our token eager Vietnam enlistee, ingenuously enthuses to his buddies: “Saigon is famous for its bitchin’ waves! That’s what I heard!”

How quickly is the world going to hell--or Hanoi--in a handbasket? With one black youth amid the lot, it’s a shoo-in that the Watts riots will flare up any second. With another kid presciently protesting the war, it’s a given the authorities will start literally cracking down. It’s not a teen-pic without a missed period or two among the gal set.

And, with no small symbolic import, the kids’ surfside diner hangout, Pop’s Paradise, is about to be torn down to make way for a shopping mall, a massive wrecking ball lurking overhead like a sword of Damocles about to carve up all that was best about American culture.

Perhaps most ominous of all--at least coming from the director who, on a much better day, gave us “American Hot Wax”--the local deejay suddenly announces, “It’s my last night on AM. I’ll be movin’ on to a new thing called . . . FM.” Shiver our timbres.

A few of the youths turn their coming-of-anxiety into something effective (Kristin Minter, especially, does a nice job of suggesting a dawning awareness of her own spoilt-ness), though others (like Dermot Mulroney, in a Beatle wig) get lost in the mulling. William A. Fraker’s cinematography handsomely strikes a burnished sunniness capturing the valedictory quality Mutrux no doubt had in mind.

But with no real levity to speak of, the well-intentioned but relentlessly self-obvious “There Goes My Baby” (off Orion’s shelf after three years of languish) seems to have been made with no real audience in mind aside, perhaps, from the presumably specialized one itching to be reminded again and again how naive we all were about the “police action” in Southeast Asia. Those who would consider that a lesson sufficiently learned are advised to hark to the voice of the prophets: Hell, no, we won’t go.

* MPAA rating: R for language and scenes of violence. Times guidelines: It includes some crude language, but the violence is mostly fleeting.

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‘There Goes My Baby’

Dermot Mulroney: Pirate

Rick Schroder: Stick

Kelli Williams: Sunshine

Jill Schoelen: Babette

Kristin Minter: Tracy

An Orion Pictures release of a Nelson Entertainment presentation. Written and directed by Floyd Mutrux. Produced by Robert Shapiro. Executive producers Barry Spikings, Rick Finkelstein. Photography William A. Fraker. Editors Danford B. Greene, Maysie Hoy. Production design Richard Sawyer. Running time: 98 minutes.

* In limited release at the Mann Regent, 1045 Broxton, Westwood, (310) 289-6266.