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

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

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.

No doubt about it, Tucker was Coppola's kind of guy, a figure no more able to contain himself within the bounds of realism than the director is. Or suitable for representation by realistic means. Tucker was an expressionistic character in search of an auteur. A self-educated backyard inventor, he designed a high-speed armored car that the Army deemed impractical and a gun turret that it learned to love during World War II. Tucker used the prototype of the armored car (according to the film) to make ice-cream runs with his kids. The reputation he gained from the turret was his chief asset in finding backing for the car he decided to make after the war ended.

Unlike the cars turned out by the established manufacturers, the Tucker looked like the vehicle the country had been fighting for, unbeholden to the past in design and loaded with unheard-of engineering features that became standard issue years later. And Tucker himself was the kind of citizen for whom the troops had been making the world safe, the maverick entrepreneur whose capital is mostly pluck and luck, making his way upward in a supposedly open society.

To depict Tucker's life with his family and its extension, his closest co- workers (Martin Landau is particularly good as his shadowy chief financial officer), Coppola uses the tones of an old Saturday Evening Post illustration, all lamplit glow. Tucker's public life, promoting his dream, looks like an ad from the same magazine, hard-edged, overly bright. But when he confronts the automotive traditionalists in his own organization or the politicians whom the movie shows endlessly harassing him at Detroit's behest, and when, finally, he ; is placed on trial for fraud, the film turns paranoid in the manner of the '40s' film noir.

The picture derives much of its energy from the surrealistic yet unpretentious play of these styles. But not all of it. The script is rich in ambiguous allusions to the sustaining myths of old-fashioned popular fiction and the folklore of capitalism. It neither blandly accepts them nor blithely satirizes them. Bridges' portrayal of Tucker is in the same key. In the largest sense, he is fully, honestly committed to his dream. But there are lovely little moments when we feel his love of hype and con for their own sake, and sense that whatever the outcome of his enterprise, he knows he has already lifted himself to legendary status.

Landau aside, no one else in the cast gets a similar opportunity to assert any complexity; Joan Allen as Tucker's wife Vera particularly suffers in this regard. But that is a small defect in a movie of large virtue. Preston Tucker failed to attain what we are pleased to think of as the American Dream of success: his factory produced only a few dozen cars before it closed. But there is another more common, more potent American Dream, which involves not the invention of products but the invention of self. And this movie, genial and fierce, is proof of Tucker's success in that more basic line. And proof of its sure grip on our imaginations.