Without Limits, Robert Towne’s 1998 biopic on long-distance running sensation Steve “Pre” Prefontaine, doesn’t usually get named as anyone’s favorite Olympics movie. Limit it strictly to movies about running, and it still may not top anyone’s "best of" list. (Chariots of Fire, for one, still looms large.) Without Limits doesn’t even necessarily have to be your favorite Towne movie about a real-life track star, as he also directed 1982’s Personal Best. Heck, it could conceivably be your second favorite late 90s movie about Prefontaine. (More on that in a bit.)

What I’m trying to get at is there are a lot of ways for Without Limits to be overlooked, pushed aside, and just generally slept on. It bombed at the box office, pulling in less than $1 million domestic, and though it was well-reviewed upon release, it has largely been lost to time, not evening meriting a plot breakdown on its Wikipedia page. But with the 2020 Olympic Summer Games finally in full swing after a year-long delay thanks to COVID, it seems to be the ideal time to point out that Without Limits is, in fact, criminally underrated. Yes, it neatly employs a standard sports-biopic formula and utilizes some themes we’ve seen before in these kinds of films. But it’s also extremely light on its feet (which seems fitting for a movie about running), jettisoning a lot of the pomp and circumstance sports movies often employ for a smaller, more character-based narrative. It also features two dynamite performances courtesy of Billy Crudup, who stars as Prefontaine in one of his earliest roles, and Donald Sutherland, coolly tweaking the “wizened mentor who could still learn a thing or two himself” trope as Bill Bowerman, Pre’s collegiate coach.

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For those unaware, Prefontaine was an American long-distance runner who exploded onto the scene as a track star for the University of Oregon in the early 1970s. He became a nationwide sensation, appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated at age 19 and racking up an absurd number of American distance-running records on the way to competing at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany. Though the Olympics didn’t quite go as planned, Pre had a bright career of more track-and-field heroics ahead of him when he died in a car wreck in 1975 at the age of 24. A life that burns bright but short makes for good biopic fodder, which Towne and Tom Cruise -- who collaborated on Days of Thunder, The Firm, and the first two Mission: Impossible movies -- certainly recognized when they started planning a film version of Pre’s story. However, the movie opens with Pre in high school, and by the late 90s, Cruise was a bit too old to pull off the role. So in stepped the younger Crudup, who at that point had done Sleepers, Inventing the Abbotts and … not much else. (Almost Famous was still two years away.) Cruise stayed on as a producer, which gave the movie the clout it needed to go up against a competing Prefontaine film that was underway at Disney. The other movie, titled simply Prefontaine, stars Jared Leto as the running legend and R. Lee Ermey as Bowerman. It opened a year before Without Limits to similarly dismal box-office returns and was reviewed less favorably than Towne’s movie.

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Image via Warner Bros.

It all makes for a moderately interesting tale of 90s Hollywood maneuvering, but Without Limits deserves recognition not for its backstory but for its ability to find meaning in a sport that so rarely makes headlines. Early in the film, Sutherland as Bowerman reveals the one thing that binds all distance runners together -- “thirteen minutes of pain that only they know.” To Prefontaine, running is a calling and each individual race is a work of art. He’s a “front-runner,” meaning he prefers to run as hard and fast as he can from the starting gun, rather than pace himself in the early laps and draft off his competitors to conserve energy. Crudup plays him as a headstrong young man who is already assured in his convictions. Meeting a Oregon runner who notably finished as the runner-up in a recent race, Pre rhetorically asks him, “God, is there anything worse than being second best?”

The scenes with Crudup and Sutherland are the film’s strongest. The two actors crackle off each other, as Pre and Bowerman form a relationship that tests and expands their belief systems without ever growing overly combative. Putting them more at odds would have been a predictable dramatic crutch, but Towne, arguably most known at the time for writing the screenplay to Chinatown, was able to craft a film that succeeds largely because of the things it doesn’t show. Without Limits lightly hints at the childhood trauma that may have contributed in making Pre the man he became without lingering very long on the subject. The movie also features a love story between Pre and a college girl named Mary Marckx (Monica Potter, who may have become the next Julia Roberts had this movie been a hit). By the time they hook up, Pre has slept with most of the girls on campus, which makes his pairing with Mary, a good Catholic girl saving herself for marriage, a bit of an odd match. Over-explaining the attraction or beefing up their differences to create artificial drama would likely only sink the entire subplot, so Towne instead chose to detail their relationship sparingly, keeping it sweet but a bit ambiguous. They like each other. That’s good enough for Pre, who tends to decide what he wants with minimal fuss and run straight at it. It’s eventually good enough for Mary too.

Without Limits doesn’t hold back on its expertly-shot races, full of slow-motion footage of bodies in motion edited for maximum dramatic effect. The Munich Olympics 5000-meter race, which is the film’s showpiece sports sequence, is thrilling from start to finish, even if the event itself serves not as a climax to Pre’s story, but rather as an important point in a journey that was unfortunately cut short by tragedy. The film employs a diverse soundtrack that bounces from a noodly, guitar-driven score to radio hits of the era to some iconic Olympic themes courtesy of Leo Arnaud and John Williams. Towne also crams in some history, touching upon the Munich Massacre, an attack on the ‘72 Israeli Olympic team by a Palestinian terrorist group that left 12 dead, and Pre’s constant battles with the Amateur Athletic Union for its unfair treatment of unpaid amatuer athletes.

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Image via Warner Bros.

Though the film can feel predictable, especially if you have any familiarity with Prefontaine’s story, it’s incredibly effective in presenting an almost poetic recreation of the life of a man who became a force of nature whenever he stepped out onto the track. The film also contains one fun surprise for anyone who’s unfamiliar with Bowerman’s ultimate claim to fame. I won’t reveal it here, and I’d urge you not to spoil yourself if you plan to watch the movie, which can be rented via most streaming apps. It’s a nice kicker to a subplot that’s deftly woven throughout the film.

Most sports movies are all about that feel-good, rah-rah moment when an underdog reaches their ultimate goal, but Without Limits has a wider range of feelings on its mind. It’s less about beating the competition than it is about pushing one’s limits beyond the point of reason. Yes, you’re meant to root for Pre, but you’re also meant to contemplate the obsessions that drove him to glory before tragedy ended his story way too soon.

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