2 Warps to Neptune

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It’s easy to forget just how fucking good an actor Jodie Foster was at such a young age. Foxes is about four valley girls trying to live it up as teenagers while at the same time being forced to fend for themselves in an adult world populated mostly by thugs, predators, and deadbeat parents. There is very little plot, and Foster, who is sort of the mother hen of the crew without being a buzzkill, essentially carries the movie on her 18-year-old shoulders. The promotional posters were hokey, as you can see above, but the movie, the directorial debut of Adrian Lyne (Fatal Attraction, Jacob’s Ladder), is nervy and raw.

The film also features Cherie Currie of The Runaways (as a drugged-out runaway, no less) and Scott Baio, who is surprisingly charming as a skateboarding nice guy who befriends Foster’s character. The girls move from one party to the next, smoke a lot of cigarettes, drink a lot of beer, get busted, pull each other out of the fire, move into their own apartment, and generally deal with the tragedy of an unjustly abbreviated childhood. The evocation of the era and the place (the San Fernando Valley, Hollywood) is almost mystical.

I’d never heard of Foxes, and found it only because I was looking for another film that came out at the same time called Little Darlings (1980). Movies that treat teenagers seriously are rare, and this one is a classic that deserves to be better known.