All in The Post-'60s Family RUNNING ON EMPTY

By RICHARD CORLISS

You don't have to listen to presidential candidates to realize that the American family is the national religion. It is a religion based on a noble fantasy: the dream of blood belonging. Some families stay together through love, or through propriety or inertia. All are bound by intimately shared joy and pain, by a need to keep the dream of personal immortality alive for just one more generation. Every parent must believe he will be born again in the new, improved image of his child.

As a family, the Popes may seem unique. Not many parents are '60s radicals like Artie (Judd Hirsch) and his wife Annie (Christine Lahti), on the lam since they bombed a university lab in the dear dread days of the Viet Nam War resistance. Even fewer have stayed together and raised two fine sons: Danny (River Phoenix), now 17, and Harry (Jonas Abry), 10. At heart, though, the Popes share the passionate conservatism of any family: their desperate fugitive adventure has become a habit worth preserving at all costs. Their secret, their constant risk of exposure, keeps them close. And Danny, in the most private and exposed time of his life, must decide whether breaking away will save his family or destroy it.

Danny is the best of both parents: gifted, generous, fiercely loyal. Growing up fugitive, he has acquired the cagey independence of an Army brat. He knows enough to stay home from school the day of the class picture. A sixth sense of self-protection tells him when someone has entered the room behind him. By nature gregarious, he must keep the truth about his family guarded from those who would be his pals. But Danny is, after all, a teenager. He has a girlfriend (Martha Plimpton) now, and a secret that is aching to burst from him like young lust.

Sidney Lumet has been here before, directing the 1983 Daniel, a fictionalized look at the Rosenberg spy family. And Phoenix has already played, in The Mosquito Coast, a teenager whose idealistic dad kept his family on the run; Plimpton offered pert consolation in that film too. Those films foundered on their ambitions; this time the pieces fall together. The actors are an ensemble who know each other like, well, family. Hirsch is righteous and funny without ever being Alan Alda; Lahti etches another of her nifty modern heroines; Phoenix shows the strength and range that could make him a must-see star for decades. All locate saving quirks in characters who could have been TV-movie-of-the-week stereotypes.

Every few months, Artie and Annie switch on the TV news and view old photographs of themselves, courtesy of the FBI. But if the Popes watched sitcoms instead of CNN, they'd see themselves there too: warm and puddly on The Wonder Years, starched and smarmy on Family Ties. Like The Wonder Years, Running on Empty is haunted by wraiths of the '60s. Like Family Ties' Alex Keaton, Danny is a decent kid with dreams that trouble his ex-rad mom and dad: Alex plans to be a yuppie Ivan Boesky; Danny wants to study piano at Juilliard. And like both these shows, the movie tiptoes away from political specifics to nestle in the capacious bosom of no-issue humanism.

There is a bracing difference, though. Running on Empty doesn't exploit the '60s legacy for easy nostalgia. It finds lessons to apply to some poignant '80s dilemmas. How do you raise a teenager in a time when the old rules for growing up are written in code on a blackboard in the dark? How do you keep the dream of family bright without eclipsing the hope of your shining son?