A teen gang in rural Oklahoma, the Greasers are perpetually at odds with the Socials, a rival group. Just one of their common brawls led to the death of a member of the Socials and marks the beginning of a Tragedy.
The film is unremitting in its morbid sentimentality, running its teenage characters through a masochistic gamut of beatings, killings, burnings, and suicides.
One of the most overtly aesthetic, art-for-art's-sake films in Hollywood's history, a faux-naĂŻf Pre-Raphaelite mural in which angels with dirty faces but immaculately pure hearts burn with a hard, gemlike flame before being snuffed out in their prime.
[Coppola's] revisions to the film, which include a new, improved soundtrack, invest it with grandeur worthy of both its characters and his own ambitions.
Suite101.com
May 05, 2013
Ultimately, "The Outsiders" feels like two movies awkwardly thrown together - one a tough-acting antiseptic to the sanitized-suburbia Spielberg fantasies that ruled the era's box office, the other a besotted valentine to widescreen epics of old.
A deeply strange film that gives '60s hoodlums the personalities of Care Bears and places them under constant attack from preppies in pastel sweaters.
Christian Science Monitor
December 11, 2007
As a movie, it's mediocre. As a clue to Coppola's thinking, it shows he still has things to learn about the relation between technology and expression.
Because it falls in with the undulating rhythm of the life of its heroes, for whom a fatal fight and a quiet night have almost equal importance, the picture never manages to reach the peaks of satisfying Hollywood melodrama.