Dave (Dennis Christopher) wanders down to the rock quarry with his buddies. Mike (Dennis Quaid) was a star high school quarterback who just got fired from the A&P. Moocher (Jackie Earle Haley) is on his own while his dad looks for work in Chicago. Cyril (Daniel Stern) played basketball in high school, but missed out on a scholarship that would have gotten him out of town.

While his buddies go for a swim, Dave declines. “I read where this Italian coach said it’s no good to go swimming right after a race.” His Dad (Paul Dooley) – a former stone cutter, now a used car salesman – is alarmed at the changes in his Italian obsessed son, and panics when he catches him shaving his legs in preparation for a cycling race.

Mike wants little more than to hang out with his buddies in Bloomington, and becomes agitated when some college kids show up at the quarry for a swim. The students generally refer to the locals as “cutters” and look down on them.

To retaliate against the incursion, Mike drives onto the campus of Indiana University, where Dave becomes smitten with a sorority girl (Robyn Douglass). He pretends to be an Italian exchange student in an effort to get her attention, later employing Cyril to play guitar as he serenades the co-ed. His romantic ploy works, but when her frat boy buddies hear about it, they chase Cyril down and beat him up.

Mike, Moocher and Cyril go to campus to find the guys responsible, and a brawl breaks out. The dean decides to give the students and the cutters another way to compete with each other, and announces that the field of the annual Little 500 Bicycle Race will be expanded to include a team from the town.

Steve Tesich moved to Indiana when he was 14. He attended Indiana University and in 1962, was an alternate rider for the fraternity team that won the Little 500 that year. The victory rider’s name was an opera loving cyclist named Dave Blase, and after Tesich began writing plays, he based a lot of the Dennis Christopher character on his college friend.

Tesich’s screenplay was off-beat, featured no roles for stars, and concerned cycling; not an easy sell. It became a labor of love for Peter Yates, an action director whose two previous films had been Mother, Jugs and Speed and The Deep. Fox spent months sneak previewing the movie, and helped turn it into a sleeper hit.

Breaking Away makes a lot of top ten lists of best sports movies of all time, but it’s a huge credit to Tesich’s work that, if you took away the cycling, you’d still have a good film. It’s essentially light hearted and not difficult to predict, but the story and characters have a texture that only comes from growing up around Bloomington, and observing the hopes and vulnerabilities of real people, as opposed to other sports movies.

The idyllic quarry scenes, and a sequence where Dave trains by racing against a semi truck, are beautifully directed. Patrick Williams adapted a fantastic musical score from Italian opera, including “Symphony No. 4 in A-Major, Opus 90.” The film was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture (Tesich won Best Original Screenplay). The field may not be very crowded, but as cycling movies go, this is the finest ever made.