Lisa Fernandes / June 15, 2023

All of the characters in Paul Schrader’s Light of Day (1987) are looking for a way out. They’re stuck in menial nine to five jobs, on the line in factories and behind candy-colored checkout stands in supermarkets. Their families are suffocatingly close-knit, with parents watching punitively over rainbow-colored birthday cakes, wondering silently what they did to deserve such ungrateful spawn. Why won’t their children go to church, buy a car, come to Sunday dinner, and settle down? The Rasnick siblings, fronting their small band The Barbusters, wander the crowded barrooms and smoldering arcades of a Cleveland that no longer exists: they’re in a state of freefall, but they’re looking for a state of grace. Salvation ends up being but a breath away.

The fact that Light of Day exists at all is amazing in its own right. It started life as a Bruce Springsteen vehicle called Born in the USA, and though The Boss liked Schrader’s script, he ultimately passed on the project. He did give Schrader a new title, and wrote the title song, on the way out the door. We all know what happened to Born in the USA—the album and the song—after that. But Springsteen wasn’t the only musician connected to the project. Light of Day marks the big screen debut of another popular MTV star and rock icon—Joan Jett, who still performs the film’s title track at live shows. 

Jett is a powerful revelation in the part of Patti Rasnick, who holds down various day jobs (barely) to keep her kid fed while keeping her eyes on the prizes of leather and neon, full arenas and autograph-hungry fans. Playing Patti allows Jett to soar within the bruised and tightly-wound skin of a down-at-heels woman struggling to get up while refusing to compromise her ideals. Patti doesn’t care about her bad reputation either, and Schrader wisely doesn’t force her to. Patti is wise enough to know how good she is, how much more she deserves, and how different her life might be had her luck gone differently. Part of Schrader’s point is that the world is filled with Pattis, and Jett brilliantly plays the difference between what she knows and what Patti knows.

Michael J. Fox splits screen time with Jett as Joe Rasnick, Patti’s more settled brother. While Joe clearly has a love of rock music and an artistic temperament, it’s clear that his dreams are simpler. Patti won’t rest until her pain is consecrated and made worthwhile by a major career breakthrough; all Joe seems to want is a regular gig, a nice girlfriend, and for his family to get along for once. While they’re both talented, the level of commitment they bring to the band is very different. Patti is meant for bigger successes, destined to end up a viral sensation twenty years after the movie’s conclusion. Joe is destined to inherit his parent’s nice suburban house, work a good union job, raise a family, and play in bars on the weekends. He’s a nice guy who’s easily pushed around by the stronger personalities surrounding him. Because Patti is the flashier character, Fox’s performance has been somewhat underrated. But he absolutely aces Joe’s smallness, his inability to make bold moves; only when he acts in defense of his vulnerable nephew and tries to please his mother does he finally break out from under his big sister’s spell. Fox stands out in the film’s smaller dramatic moments, as when Joe is seen alone outside of his dying mother’s hospital room, as hunched and withered as the woman in the bed. He makes Joe likable, sympathetic.  

Joe’s everyman dreams anchor a life with no fixed stars. He dates a nice, upstanding-seeming blonde girl from a richer background, but she fades out of his life when she realizes how messy things are between him and the rest of his family, and how poorly she fits into his working class world. Patti herself has no steady significant other, mainly dedicating her life to music, even at the expense of her young son Benji (Billy L. Sullivan). She commits petty burglary to get the band a new sound board and shoplifts steaks with her son’s unwitting help to reward the band after a brief, anemic wintertime tour leads them nowhere. It’s not Patti but Joe who suffers in both incidents—Patti burglarizes a cousin of a co-worker, who knows exactly who took his tools and demands she pay up, forcing Joe to lean on their angelic mom. And Joe witnesses her shoplift and chews her out over it, leading to an explosive fight and the band’s temporary breakup.

Patti is never clever enough in her schemes to avoid detection, necessitating Joe’s apologies, his bowing and scraping to those who Patti has wronged. This is, we know, how it is between the two. His embarrassed apologies to their parents, who stand back and sigh and tisk at their daughter’s misfortunes, are accepted and received with almost presidential superiority. They all know they can’t really help her. The truth is that Patti sold her soul to rock ‘n’ roll years ago. It’s the only thing that saved her life when the family priest raped and impregnated her as a teenager, a fact she can’t bring herself to confess to her uber-religious mother Jeanette (Gena Rowlands), who still looks to the preacher as a spiritual advisor and looks down on Patti as a fallen Christian.

In turn, Patti has rejected her suburban childhood, the manicured lawns, the safety of the snowbound lanes surrounding their split-level house and the bromides of Jeanette and their cipher-like father, who loves his kids but stays out of Jeanette’s way. Even worse, Patti has rejected God and churchgoing itself. Joe still needs and loves all of these things; he’s never seen to pray, but their parents aren’t worried for his immortal soul. As a duo, Patti and Joe’s united dreams are beginning to untangle. The older Joe gets, the more he begins to yearn for the safety that his parents offer with every home-cooked meal and trip to the mall. The conflict that wears upon them all is a doozy—Joe, Benjamin Senior (Jason Miller), and Jeanette don’t know who Benji’s father is, and Patti simply wants to forget his name and that of the God he claims to serve. 

Interestingly, Patti does not reject or blame her son for what has happened to her. She is shown to be strict but loving, and parents with a sense of humor; she also would rather die than allow Jeanette to raise her child even for a couple of weeks. While Patti tries to prove she’s a good mom by trying to do right by Benji, she also pulls him out of school abruptly in the name of rock ‘n’ roll righteousness. She’s not interested in looking like a good mom to anyone. Ultimately, her choices are another act of defiance against Jeannette.

Joe is a conventionally good uncle, and becomes something of a surrogate father to Benji as Patti joins a different band and spends most of her nights performing. He wants Benji to have an ordinary life instead of whatever haphazard world Patti can offer him. Little Benji, seen strumming a plastic guitar in several scenes, clearly plans on taking after them both—and Joe will do anything to prevent that. He inserts himself nonstop into the boy’s life to offer him a sense of regularity and shouts down Patti for turning Benji into a pawn in her war of attrition with their mother. Joe’s the one who’s stuck making most of the decisions when Jeanette suddenly begins to decline in a way that seems to portend Alzheimer’s Disease but instead presages a quick, devastating cancer death. Only Gena Rowlands’s haunting, gentle performance helps make that part of the story work. Really, Jeanette’s death only exists as an object lesson for Patti (less of one for Joe, whose mourning seems secondary to the situation). 

And die she must, for Jeanette is just one in a long line of suffering, imperfect, Christlike figures who haunt Schrader’s writing. She’s the most human among them, the most easy to relate to, and the easiest to sympathize with. She’s no radical like Travis Bickle, but she causes a storm and a revolution in her own limited way. In Jeanette, forever forgiving, forever faithful, forever motherly—even when she’s trying not to be—Schrader finds maybe the most holy and sacrificing of all the female characters in his entire canon.  

Martyrdom may rule the entire Rasnick household, but it’s Patti who refuses to kneel. It takes Jeanette’s death to change anything, to bring about reconciliation. Patti promises that she’ll do what she must to join Jeanette in heaven, but one cannot picture her in church every Sunday. One can’t imagine her accepting communion, or subjecting Benji to the rituals she has rejected for so long, doled out by the man who abused her. Nor should she. If she spends more time in an arcade than at Sunday services, Jeanette will never know. The important thing is that they come to understand one another before Jeannette dies.

All of the Rasnicks are failed, in one way or another, by the great Gods in their lives. Jeanette‘s prayers draw Patti back to the fold of both home and religion, but don’t provide much succor as she lays dying, much of her recent recall obliterated by the strain of the illness. Joe quits his job to take The Barbusters beyond their regional roots, but returns to pressing out TV trays and taking care of his mother. Benji is let down by his mom’s choices and his family’s infighting. Benjamin Senior, who has spent his adult life worshiping his wife, now has no one in his bed. Patti is betrayed by the gods of rock; she ends up the lead singer of a Vixen-like pop metal band called the Hunzz, precipitating The Barbusters’ breakup and ever-so-slightly selling out to the mainstream in the process. What keeps them all going is their love for one another in the face of their imploding dreams, tied together like lifeboats on a sinking ship. 

The grimy and arid depictions of life in Cleveland in the mid-to-late 1980s shows a town slowly calcifying into a mini desert—the vanishing dream of Reagan’s Morning in America. Schrader’s visual palette snakes between the muted pastels of a shopping mall (stuffed with luxuries the Rasnicks can barely afford) to vermillion neon signs and concrete-colored urban landscapes filled with foreboding looking factories, which look rusted out and precarious, as if they’re about to chug to a stop at any moment. Schrader has derided his work on the film as visually uninteresting, claiming that his landscapes are flat. And yet he plays with the colors of the night and the late-day sunshine in a way that feels natural and unique. The scrubby parks and roadside motels and gloomy supermarkets are compelling precisely because of their glorious ordinariness. And the beautifully framed shots of the band rehearsing together as light streams into an otherwise silent and dark bar are as striking as a Renaissance painting. 

Decades later, the landscape the Rasnick siblings inhabited is long gone. The MarshAlan Industries building where Joe and bandmate Bu (Michael McKean) plied their trade was abandoned in 2000 and razed in 2006; the Euclid Tavern, where The Barbusters play their triumphant film-ending gig, shuttered in the late teens. Light of Day memorializes the Rasnicks’ America, a world frozen forever on a tightrope between what could be and what has died. 

To quote Dennis Potter, the song has ended, but the melody lingers on.

Lisa Fernandes has been writing since she could talk. Her bylines include Newsweek; Women Write About Comics; Smart Bitches, Trashy Books; and All About Romance.