1999 was a big year for movies. It was the year that The Matrix‘s slow-motion bullet influenced action movies for years to come. It was the year American Beauty won Best Picture at the Academy Awards and Oscar fans have been arguing about it ever since. It was the year Pokémon jumped from Gameboys and TV to the big screen. And worst of all, it was the year that disappointed a generation of Star Wars fans with the release of The Phantom Menace.
To celebrate that landmark year in film’s 20th Anniversary, The Pop Break is launching a new, year-long retrospective of 1999’s most influential (at least to us) films. The series kicks off with music editor Kat Manos reflecting on watching young Jake Gyllenhaal in October Sky.
We have seen a lot of Jake Gyllenhaal over the years. I mean this literally in that he’s in a lot of movies, and figuratively, in that his range as an actor still blows me away. We’re barely two months into 2019, and Netflix audiences have already watched Gyllenhaal become a pretentious, sexually-fluid, art critic on the run from cursed paintings in Dan Gilroy’s Velvet Buzzsaw. Then, before summer’s end, movie theater audiences will see him transform SPOILER into the Marvel supervillain, Mysterio and face off against the youngest member of the Avengers in Spider-Man: Far From Home.
But remember the first time we saw Jake Gyllenhaal? Oscar voters first took notice of him in Ang Lee’s heartbreaking 2005 film, Brokeback Mountain, while many millennials remember him escaping cataclysmic weather in Roland Emmerich’s disturbingly prophetic, The Day After Tomorrow in 2004. Cool kids and film snobs might consider 2001’s Donnie Darko his breakout performance, and perhaps they’re right. But me? I go earlier than that. The first time I saw Jake Gyllenhaal on-screen was actually 20 years ago this month in 1999’s October Sky.
From the nostalgic mind of Joe Johnston – the director behind fun, pre-WWII and mid-century period pieces The Rocketeer and Captain America: The First Avenger – October Sky focuses on the small coal mining town of Coalwood, West Virginia in 1957. More accurately, it focuses on young Homer Hickam (played by a 17-year-old Gyllenhaal) who falls in love with rocket science, becomes a real-life NASA engineer, and whose best-selling memoir Rocket Boys inspired the film.
The movie was released in a time when space – for lack of better phrasing – was having a moment in cinema. Aside from a slew of Star Trek: The Next Generation films, the ’90s saw Apollo 13, Event Horizon, Stargate, Armageddon, Galaxy Quest, and even Muppets From Space come to theaters. October Sky still stands out to me among all those if only because it accomplishes one thing that no other movie alone could do: tell a completely true story that doesn’t appeal to the horrors of outer space while inspiring kids to love science.
In my experience, people either love October Sky, or have never heard of it. If you fall into the latter group, please know that you are missing out. Aside from Gyllenhaal’s heartwarming performance in the lead role, Oscar winner Chris Cooper plays the part of his tough-love coal miner father John Hickam, while Oscar nominee Laura Dern is Miss Riley, the inspiring science teacher who sees potential in Homer and his friends. The supporting cast of Rocket Boys that help Homer enter the science fair and strangely experiment with railroad tracks include pitch-perfect performances from Chris Owen, William Lee Scott, and Chad Lindberg. Homer’s mother Elsie, played by Natalie Canerday, has slowly become my favorite role over the years—if only because her one-liners represent so many mothers, wives, and female leaders of the time.
The film’s performances are only enhanced by the claustrophobic small-town atmosphere of Coalwood, which seems to run purely on the coal mine that employs half the town, and football. Multiple characters remark that the only way out of Coalwood is with a scholarship, which feels strangely prescient to 2019, when young people must resort to loans if they dream of a higher education. The film’s minor subplot involving the miner’s union strike also feels timely, if only because the closing of a mine somehow became national news in an election year. If the stark imagery of blue-collar workers that The Hunger Games almost certainly stole from this movie isn’t enough to keep you interested, then the beautifully crafted score from the insanely prolific Mark Isham should be enough to move you. Featuring heart-wrenching string orchestrations that haunt the entire film and honestly make me tear-up to this day, the music in October Sky is enough to inspire anyone to attend a local rocket launch.
Naysayers might characterize October Sky as schmaltzy, corny, or low-key biopic Oscar bait, but I think that’s a little reductive. More than once, Homer Hickam and his friends literally use math and science to craft themselves a promising future. When the group is falsely accused of starting a fatal fire in town, Gyllenhaal’s character uses real math to prove his own innocence. While some characters in the movie find themselves trapped by circumstance – including poverty, alcoholism, and abuse – our protagonist shows that cracking open a book to study can actually make a difference. High-class intellectualism isn’t the key to success in Coalwood, but merely a textbook provided by a teacher at the local high school can lay the groundwork for freedom. Perhaps I was an overly sentimental and nerdy child the first time I saw this, but that message really resonated with me.
October Sky is probably the only movie about rocket science I can think of that doesn’t immediately alienate its audience when everyone on-screen starts talking about physics; in fact, it makes the math seem quite approachable. Maybe it’s the combination of young Jake Gyllenhaal’s face and Laura Dern’s West Virginia drawl, but it’s unbelievably easy to root for the film’s heroes. Sure, the stakes can feel a little trite at worst and metaphorically moving at best. You deeply pray that Jake Gyllenhaal gets out of coal mining after his father is injured in an accident so Homer doesn’t develop black lung and get stuck in the mine forever, but mostly you want him to win the science fair. And that’s okay. I’d like to meet the cold-hearted person who can easily watch the sequence that closes out this movie without feeling anything—though I suspect they don’t exist.
More than anything, October Sky is the type of wholesome movie that really sticks with you because of its humanity. Like any unathletic, nerdy kid from a small town, Gyllenhaal’s Homer searches for a way out of his older brother’s shadow and away from the family business, and looks to the stars instead. While most kids can’t look up into the 1957 October sky and lock eyes with Sputnik, most of us can comprehend the desire for adventure, paving a new path, and uncovering the unknown. In a year when headlines and scientists alike mourned having to say goodbye to a little rover all the way on Mars, it’s clear that many of us look for hope amongst the stars. And I can thank October Sky for planting that seed of hope in me 20 years ago.
