The Passion of Pre 
The tale of the track star and his coach reframes the traditional spots biopic 
by Shawn Levy 
 
Ever since "Rocky," American sports movies have been dominated by the big game or fight, the triumph of the little guy, and the unqualified affirmation of the superstar athlete and actor. Even the best sports films of our era, from "Hoosiers" to "Bull Durham" to "The Mighty Ducks," have partaken of that film's themes of upset victory (if not actual, then moral), personality-driven, head-to-head competition, and the colossal emergence of the underdog. 

In this climate, another sort of sports  movie, the kind that prevailed in the Hollywood of the studio era, has been forgotten (or relegated to cable, which is practically the same thing): the sports biopic. For decades, such movies as "The Pride of the Yankees," "Jim Thorpe, All-American" and "Fear Strikes Out" presented to viewers images of real-life athletes whose lives made them moral exemplars, mythological figures whose journeys could offer us guidance for our own. 

Without Limits, the second feature film in as many years to depict the life of Oregon track legend Steve Prefontaine, harks back to this tradition of moviemaking in several respects. 

Like "Prefontaine," the likable 1997 film that barely got a national release, "Without Limits" is a straightforward biography. It tells the well-known story of the middle-distance runner's journey from Coos Bay to the University of Oregon, his volatile relationship with track coach Bill Bowerman, the conflict between his ferocious competitive spirit and his free-spirited, hedonistic nature, his many stunning victories, his indelible loss in the 5,000-meter race at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, and his untimely death in an auto accident. 

But as written by its director, Robert Towne, and his co-scenarist, Pre's Olympic teammate Kenny Moore, Without Limits transcends both feel-good sports clichés and by-the-numbers biography. 

The movie focuses not on Prefontaine's quest to beat Finnish runner Lasse Viren for a gold medal or to see American amateur athletes treated more equitably. Rather, it takes the shape of a philosophical debate between two highly competitive men: one a teacher who has analyzed his subject to the limits of human perfection, the other a genius athlete whose determination and fire stretch the very definition of human perfection to new horizons. It's only appropriate that the Olympic games should figure so prominently in Without Limits; in certain regards, it plays like a Platonic dialogue between the irascible Bowerman and the incendiary Pre. 

But this is not to suggest that Without Limits is verbose or pedantic or dull. Quite the contrary. The film moves with a strange, jazzy rhythm — you may be reminded of a really good Grateful Dead jam as it shifts with the striking of a guitar chord from offbeat scene to offbeat scene. It pulses with sly humor. It's marked by powerful performances and an evocative sense of place and time.  Its depiction of the 1972 Olympic race is poetic and gripping. It's sheer entertainment that coincidentally makes you think. 

Billy Crudup stars as Pre, and it's a potentially career-making performance. Like Jared Leto, who played the runner in "Prefontaine," Crudup is the spitting image of the real thing: blazing eyes, prominent cheekbones, flowing hair, pigeon chest, gangly arms and legs. He projects Pre's rabid intensity, but also his discomforting egoism and his overweening pride. It's not a pretty picture — this is a flawed young man — but it's a powerful one. 

Powerful, too, is Donald Sutherland as Bowerman, a man of finicky ways whose visions of the ideal athlete are superseded by the runner whom he calls "Rube" for his country-boy ways. His good humor and focus come through, but he reaches for a bit more. In one of the most impressive moments in his spotty career, Sutherland utterly transforms himself during a single take from stoic patriarch to red-eyed mourner as he delivers a eulogy for the dead runner at Hayward Field. It's a fabulous scene. 

No one else in the cast matches these performances, perhaps because the film is only interested in this one relationship. All of the remarkable things that Prefontaine was, Without Limits seems to tell us, emerge from the drive and desire that made him able to lock horns with his remarkable coach. In the story of this troubled, profound, loving relationship, the filmmakers have found an emblem for some of the great struggles of the human heart.