Without Limits 
by Kevin Maynard
 
Rock and roll reckless and a major babe to boot, Olympic runner Steve Prefontaine and his short but remarkable life have all the makings of a Hollywood biopic. The cocky young athlete had determination and talent to burn after the 1972 Munich Olympics culminated in an Israeli bombing incident; he never got the chance to compete again. Pre, as he was called, was killed in a car accident at the age of 24. No wonder there has been enough interest in him to spawn two feature films in two years. The first, Prefontaine, was an especially large disappointment, as it was the fiction feature debut of documentarian Steve James (Hoop Dreams). The second, Without Limits, has an even more impressive pedigree: It is acclaimed writer- director Robert Towne's first film in a decade. 

Less a boy-meets-girl than a boy-meets-mentor love story, Without Limits deals largely with the complex relationship between Pre (Billy Crudup) and his famed University of Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman (Donald Sutherland). As played by Crudup (Sleepers), our hero is a cocky, confident surfer-like dude with incredible Jim Morrison-style magnetism. The young actor turns in a star-making
                     performance, exuding an unexpected intensity on and off the track; he's
                     especially good in the many scenes in which he challenges his tough but
                     fair mentor. Towne really takes us inside the minds of these men, and
                     Sutherland brilliantly plays Bowerman with endearing bewilderment.
                     (He knows Pre is not a team player, but he is too dazzled by his "pure-
                     guts" instinct to care.) Pre doesn't play by the rules, but he's always the
                     fastest and he always wins. 

                     Aside from this central relationship, Without
                     Limits isn't always surefooted. The romance
                     between Pre and his girlfriend Mary (Monica
                     Potter) is pretty generic, and a subplot involving
                     Pre's battle to dismantle the corrupt, controlling
                     Amateur Athletic Union is handled in peripheral
                     and perfunctory fashion. His running mates (Billy
                     Burke, Jeremy Sisto, Matthew Lillard) are well-cast, but handled
                     interchangeably (which is odd considering that Pre's close friend and
                     peer Kenny Moore served as co-writer and consultant); and the film's
                     denouement is too literal to create emotional fireworks. (While Towne's
                     dialogue is mostly true-to-form terrific, Bowerman's last "test the limits
                     of the human heart" speech is too on the money.)

                     Film critic Pauline Kael once called Towne "a flaky classicist." He's a
                     writer with a talent for rough, edgy characters who speak the way
                     people speak, in off-the-cuff anecdotes that have a strange way of
                     affecting us. But despite Towne's seminal screenplays for The Last
                     Detail, Chinatown, and Shampoo, and numerous efforts as a script
                     doctor, he hasn't had the same success as a writer-director. (Personal
                     Best felt like a drawn-out Sapphic Nike ad; Tequila Sunrise coasted
                     on Towne's snappy dialogue and star power from Mel Gibson, Kurt
                     Russell, and Michelle Pfeiffer, but the crime-drama plotting went
                     nowhere). 

                     His latest film benefits from intelligent lead performances, awesome
                     cinematography by the legendary Conrad L. Hall (Butch Cassidy and
                     the Sundance Kid), and a mercifully unsentimental take on the triumph
                     of the human spirit. Working within the confines of a true story, Towne has made his most fluid, emotionally charged directorial work.

And yet, Without Limits is curiously stilted. It ultimately falls short of eliciting our tears despite its built-in tragic ending. In a season loaded with cookie-cutter macho action flicks, Scream-teen clones, and traditional women's weepies, Towne's latest film stands out because he wrote it. Maybe it would have stirred our hearts more if he hadn't directed it.