There is a certain kind of film that fails at the box office and then spends the next four decades proving everyone wrong. Blade Runner did it. The Thing did it. Streets of Fire did it too, though with less critical rehabilitation and more stubborn, grassroots devotion from a fanbase that has never accepted the world's initial verdict.

Walter Hill's 1984 rock-and-roll fable earned roughly $8 million against a budget that exceeded $14 million. It was marketed as a summer action movie, reviewed as a confused genre exercise, and abandoned by its studio within weeks. Forty years later, it may be the purest distillation of 1980s cinema ever committed to celluloid — a film that understood the decade's aesthetic so completely that the decade itself wasn't ready for it.

THE WORLD HILL BUILT

The opening title card sets the terms: "A Rock & Roll Fable." Not a musical. Not an action film. A fable — a story that takes place in a world that doesn't correspond to any real geography or timeline. The city in Streets of Fire has elevated trains and 1950s cars and neon signs and leather gangs and rock concerts, all existing simultaneously, as if someone had fed every decade of American popular culture into a blender and poured the result into a single, rain-soaked city block.

Hill, who had already directed The Warriors (1979) and 48 Hrs. (1982), intended Streets of Fire as the first entry in a trilogy — an ongoing series set in this unnamed, timeless city. The studio, Universal, saw dollar signs and gave him the budget. What they got was a film that defied every category they had available to sell it.

The plot is deliberately archetypal: Ellen Aim (Diane Lane), a rock star, is kidnapped by a motorcycle gang led by Raven Shaddock (Willem Dafoe). Her ex-boyfriend Tom Cody (Michael Paré), a loner and drifter, returns to rescue her. That's it. The story could be summarized on a bar napkin, and Hill wanted it that way. The simplicity of the narrative was the scaffolding on which everything else was hung — the music, the visuals, the atmosphere.

JIM STEINMAN'S MUSIC

If Streets of Fire has a secret weapon, it's Jim Steinman. The songwriter behind Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell contributed two of the film's most important songs: "Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young" and "Nowhere Fast." Both are operatic, grandiose, and absurdly earnest — Steinman's specialty. They treat rock and roll as a matter of life and death, which is exactly what the film demands.

"Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young," which plays during the final concert sequence, is one of the great underappreciated rock anthems of the 1980s. Performed on screen by Diane Lane (lip-syncing to a vocal track by Laurie Sargent and Holly Sherwood), it builds from a quiet ballad to a wall-of-sound crescendo that feels genuinely euphoric. The song, like the film, commits fully to its own emotions without a trace of irony.

Dan Hartman's "I Can Dream About You," performed by the fictional group The Sorels, became the film's most commercially successful song, reaching the Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 — one of the strange ironies of a film that failed to find an audience in theaters but reached millions through its soundtrack.

DAFOE AND THE VILLAIN PROBLEM

Willem Dafoe as Raven Shaddock is one of the great unhinged performances of the decade. Dressed in rubber waders and leather, leading a biker gang called The Bombers through a city he seems to regard with barely contained contempt, Dafoe plays the role with the coiled menace that would later define his work in Platoon and Wild at Heart. He's not chewing scenery — he's dismantling it, piece by piece, with a grin.

The film's climactic confrontation — a sledgehammer duel between Paré and Dafoe, staged like a heavyweight boxing match — is one of the most absurd and thrilling action sequences of the era. Two men swinging pickaxe handles at each other in an alley while a crowd watches. No guns. No special effects. Just choreographed violence that looks and sounds like it hurts.

THE CAST THEY ASSEMBLED

Beyond Lane, Paré, and Dafoe, the film features Rick Moranis as Ellen Aim's hapless manager Billy Fish — a comedic performance that grounds the film's more operatic tendencies in something recognizably human. Amy Madigan plays McCoy, the tough-talking soldier of fortune hired to help with the rescue, a role that subverts every damsel expectation the plot sets up. Bill Paxton and Ed Begley Jr. appear in smaller roles, part of an ensemble that reads, in retrospect, like a who's-who of performers on the cusp of major careers.

THE AFTERLIFE

The cult around Streets of Fire didn't form immediately. It grew through VHS rentals in the late 1980s, cable television airings in the 1990s, and eventually through DVD and Blu-ray releases that brought the film's neon-drenched cinematography into sharper focus than it had ever enjoyed in theaters.

The film's influence, too, has been wider than its commercial failure would suggest. Japanese anime and video games have drawn heavily from its visual language — the rain-slicked streets, the neon signs, the fusion of rock music and urban combat. It's the kind of film that other artists discover and file away as a reference point, even if they never name it directly.

Walter Hill never made his planned sequels. Michael Paré never became the star the film was designed to launch. Diane Lane's career stalled for years afterward. But the film itself — improbable, excessive, sincere to the point of recklessness — has outlived every reasonable prediction about its shelf life.

Some films are ahead of their time. Streets of Fire was outside of time altogether, which is why it never ages. It was never of 1984. It was always of itself.