It was during production of The Outsiders – their first collaboration together – that Hinton and Francis Ford Coppola began writing the screenplay for Rumble Fish. And, in turn, revealing that Hinton’s book is as much a reflection on the naiveté of youth as it is about living in the midst of it. Still, taking Hinton’s advice and revisiting the book as an adult confirms that time and experience (and whiskey, of course) impart a certain level of clarity, sparking awareness that the brooding Motorcycle Boy is as much the narrator of this story as Rusty-James. It’s a narrative demanding we read between the lines, searching for meaning as elusive as the mysterious character known only as the Motorcycle Boy. Then again, Rumble Fish is deceptively simple on the surface, masking its depth with the simple-minded perspective of self-proclaimed tough guy, Rusty-James. Given that she invented the young-adult genre with her quintessential teen novel, The Outsiders, it’s surprising the author would suggest that one of her books may be more accessible to adults.

Hinton gives young readers when they claim they didn’t understand Rumble Fish.

“Read it again when you’re twenty-five, about one in the morning, on your third whiskey.” This is the advice S.E. “If you’re going to lead people, you have to have somewhere to go.” In the process, I hope to unveil how these two vastly different mediums work together to tell the same story, from cover to credits. In this column, I’ll be checking out old and new adaptations to further explore both sides of that experience. As a lifelong bookworm and cinephile, I've discovered that whether I read the book before or after seeing the movie can have a profound influence on my enjoyment of the story across both mediums. While we've all uttered some version of this sentiment at one point or another, there have been those rare occasions when the opposite is true. 'Don't judge a book by its movie' is another common jab. 'The book was better' is a phrase heard often in conversations about book-to-film adaptations.

Rumble fish by se hinton