Cinema: On The Road to Utopia TUCKER: THE MAN AND HIS DREAM Directed by Francis Ford Coppola Screenplay by Arnold Schulman and David Seidler

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They meet with the Spruce Goose looming dramatically behind them -- two legends from the lunatic fringe of American capitalism. Howard Hughes (Dean Stockwell, in another of his sharply incised cameos) gestures toward history's largest airplane. "They say it can't fly," he intently whispers, "but that's not the point." We in the audience laugh, poor conventional souls that we are, brought up to believe the goal of invention is not self-satisfaction but marketability and, just possibly, the chance to improve mankind's general welfare. How boring!

Preston Tucker (Jeff Bridges, in the performance of his life) knows better. He just nods sober agreement with Hughes. He is in the process of creating a utopian automobile that will get no further off the ground, commercially speaking, than the Goose did. But who cares? He is not in the business of building empires; he is in the business of building dreams. And for him, as for Hughes, it is necessary to reproduce his fancy only once in reality to achieve fulfillment. Indeed, after seeing Francis Coppola's marvelous Tucker, one believes that if the inventor had been forced to replicate his car endlessly on a production line, promote it and warrant it and tweak it around to create a little novelty each new model year, Tucker might have ended up running on empty, one of those corporate windbags booming the virtues of an individualism he has long since mislaid.

Failure rescued Tucker from that dismal fate. He has passed into popular history as a more interesting figure, at once heroic and cautionary: the little guy who dared to buck the big guys and got squished in the process. It is easy to see why he appealed to Coppola, who has been trying to put Tucker's story on the screen for something like a decade. It is not just simply that as a child Coppola was knocked out by a glimpse of the Tucker Torpedo at an auto show in the late '40s. It is rather that he too is a merchant of slightly skewed dreams, a tilter at his industry's conventional wisdom and a man who is himself a typical American genius, half visionary, half humbug.

His movie is powered by the director's sense of kinship with his protagonist. Indeed, it is possible that if Coppola had been able to make this picture when he wanted to, he and his audience would have been spared much painful groping. For since 1974, when he released The Godfather, Part II and The Conversation almost simultaneously, he has been a stylist in search of a subject. Even in the midst of a mess like The Cotton Club (1984), he was capable of striking stunning imagery, bold intensifications of reality that lodged permanently in one's movie memory. But the narratives carrying them did not seem to engage his emotions fully. Coppola was a director for hire to his own ego, and his personal drama, mostly involving multiple brushes with bankruptcy, was more dramatic than anything he placed on the screen.

In order finally to make Tucker, he formed a partnership with his sometime protege, George Lucas, a producer gifted in what the director lacks: story sense and budget sense. The result is a film consistent narratively, confident stylistically and abounce with the quaint quality that animated both the hero and his times, something we used to call pep.