Walking into The Rio Theatre for the 40th anniversary screening of the cult classic film Rad, I had to assume I wasn’t the intended audience. My knowledge of anything BMX/bikes/sport/outdoor culture is non-existent, so much so that even a beloved movie about it never crossed my desk. To validate that, I consulted my only degree of connection to that world, my brother-in-law and professional mountain biker, Ed.
Me: “Have you heard of this movie? [sends movie poster]”
Ed: “ya it’s a classic”
That panged an egg-on-my-face, shameful thought spiral of ‘How did I not know about this?’ plaguing my mind for days leading up to the screening.
Inside the Rio, I was met with a crowd of Rad-heads who were there to participate in the screening like it was Rocky Horror. Luckily, they welcomed humble plebeians like me in with open arms, clearly wanting to relish in this rare, collective experience.
I understood what I was in for as soon as the movie started. The movie leaves very little up for interpretation—a lost art form, arguably. The brilliantly corny dialogue has no subtext, the stakes are stated plainly, and the narrative moves in a perfectly forward direction. There’s something slightly absurd about a movie being so straightforward, it feels refreshing. The texture of Rad is its unusually vivid version of suburban Americana. Primary colours satisfy and dominate the palette—bright reds, yellows, royal blues—cut cleanly across open streets and lush, trimmed lawns. The 1980s nostalgia works perfectly here, and not in a St****er Th**gs way, but in an actual, ‘kids used to be free and full of youthful folly’ kind of way. It made hobbies look fun.
Rad’s most memorable moments come from its pure, camp-adjacent willingness to be earnest. There’s a school dance sequence partway into the film that, for only a few minutes, transforms Rad into something closer to Saturday Night Fever but with bikes, and does so with complete sincerity. No irony, no parody, just a full commitment to the bit. That same energy carries through everywhere else, like the incredibly obvious (and glorious) switching from Lori Loughlin to male-stunt-double-in-a-wig. It even extends to the film’s more familiar beats, probably popularizing (don’t fact check that) the teen movie trope of a parent giving their kid an ultimatum between passion and school: “It’s not my dream dad, it’s your dream.” And then there’s the antagonist, which could’ve been a further opportunity for kitsch, but instead the film takes a surprisingly blunt and convicted anti-corporation stance. You can’t help but love that. The big suits in Rad are the sponsors (Mongoose, Vans, etc.), and their attempts to regulate the sport are met with complete objection by the protagonist, Cru, and in turn the film as a whole. All of these pieces add up to something people clearly want to return to, and more importantly, return to together; the mark of a true cult classic.
Crowd reactions rippled through the theatre as if we were a live studio audience. “Oooo” when the characters have their first kiss. “Ahhhh” when Cru falls on a jump. Groans when the bad guys devise a plan. Applause when the good guys win. If it wasn’t a Tuesday evening, it felt like an after-party would’ve broken out.
That kind of shared language—events and places where people gather just to enjoy the same thing together without a clear transactional purpose—feels increasingly rare, especially in places like Vancouver where third spaces close down as soon as they open. Watching Rad play to a room like this, it’s hard not to notice how much of its appeal depends on a period of time that doesn’t operate like that.
Rad, like many cult classics, comes from a time before everything needed to be explained, optimized, or repackaged. Its conflict stays simple: do the thing you care about, or don’t. Now something like this would be filtered through layers of irony or turned into slop before it even had a chance. Which makes the turnout at the Rio feel slightly improbable. People showed up ready, responsive, already in sync with something that, on paper, shouldn’t have this kind of longevity. It helps that there are still people in the industry, like at Utopia and Fathom Entertainment, that understand audience’s wants and needs, and that a film like this deserves to be experienced in a room, not just online.
A film like Rad wasn’t built to last forty years. It’s too specific, too straightforward, too unconcerned with how it might be received outside its moment. And yet, behold a radical miracle.
