Tom Cruise rewatch: Born on the Fourth of July is his arrival at the ugly truth

Celebrating today's release of Top Gun: Maverick, our writers return to their favorite Tom Cruise movies, in appreciation of an on-screen persona that's evolved over decades.

Recently, a 1990 Playboy interview with Tom Cruise was resurfaced via Gizmodo, in which he called the possibility of making a sequel to Top Gun "irresponsible." He doesn't mince words: "I want the kids to know that that's not the way war is — that Top Gun was just an amusement-park ride, a fun film with a PG-13 rating that was not supposed to be reality. That's why I didn't go on and make Top Gun II and III and IV and V."

People are allowed to change their minds over 32 years, and the stunt-happy star of Top Gun: Maverick (a deeply enjoyable action movie that, as our critic notes, is almost "a rippling ad for America itself") no doubt has his reasons to return to the wellspring of his celebrity. But Cruise made his true feelings about war known when he aligned with Oliver Stone to make the enraged Born on the Fourth of July only three years after his 1986 blockbuster sent him stratospheric.

Everett Collection

Cruise's films right after Top Gun are revealing: one with Martin Scorsese (the fizzy The Color of Money), another with Barry Levinson (an understated turn in Rain Man), a third for the fans (Cocktail). That's precisely the right way to spend your Hollywood capital if the goal is being taken seriously. And Cruise's collaboration with Stone on Born is the capstone to that trajectory, an opportunity for the actor to uncork a Big Angry Performance. It worked: Cruise got his first Best Actor Oscar nomination.

Hairline and makeup departments toil overtime to put Cruise in the wheelchair as Ron Kovic, the Long Island-born Marine sergeant who suffered spinal separation in Vietnam, only to rebound as an embittered activist. Cruise's little-boyness is his secret weapon, selling Kovic's initial naïveté as a patriotic kid who can't even bear to hear it when friends warn him about enlisting to fight a battle in a faraway land. Cruise shreds his voice raw in shrieking scenes with his family, and by the time his Kovic has regrouped, there's a sense of betrayal burning in dead eyes.

Everett Collection

Still figuring out how to modulate rage over the course of a feature, Cruise, then only 27, hasn't come to his most accomplished work. But he's impressively messy and galvanic. The most notorious scene — in which Cruise's drunken, paralyzed-from-the-waist-down veteran screams "penis" repeatedly at his bawling mother (Caroline Kova) — hasn't aged well. Yet the moment right after that one suddenly feels masterful: Cruise turns himself into an exhausted baby, carried to his childhood bedroom in the arms of the actor playing his father (Raymond J. Barry). Tucked in, Ron cries quietly, "Who's ever going to love me, Dad?" Cruise shields his eyes, his face, and it's devastating.

Never a subtle filmmaker, Stone kicks things off in overheated 1950s nostalgia mode (composer John Williams seals the deal with his tremulous strings), and the movie only get louder from there, emotionally and otherwise. But credit Cruise for committing to the plunge. He knew what Stone needed, emptying himself in service of a ragged, dissatisfied bleat at injustice. Born is the point where Cruise's real chops emerge; you don't arrive at his zenith portrayals of seething blowhards in Magnolia and Tropic Thunder without passing through this boot camp.

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