Rumble Fish (1983) is a movie that is almost painfully personal, in ways both direct and indirect. His determination to downsize, to make a film on a more “human” scale, found Coppola getting lost yet again in his own studio, crafting the convoluted One from the Heart (1981), a musical as beguiling and confounding-and moving-today as it ever has been. That is 1979’s Apocalypse Now, a movie that he has tinkered with several times since its contentious opening.

He then used the currency acquired via the Godfather pictures to rebuild his production shingle and take on an ambitious project about Western civilization’s madness that would come close to driving him, and many others, mad.

Between those two pictures, he made The Conversation, a movie very much him, about a man feeling very much trapped in a web he eventually sees (or does he?) as being of his own making. Because despite how much of himself he had put into the organized-crime saga, he felt it wasn’t him. Coppola poured gallons of family feeling, lore, and food love into The Godfather, the 1972 movie that made his name-and then felt hugely alienated by the fact that that film, and its 1974 sequel, indeed had made his name. For Coppola, that tension was (almost hilariously) articulated early on, when he followed up the quirky 1966 coming-of-age story You’re a Big Boy Now with the 1968 musical Finian’s Rainbow, the last such genre picture for the legendary Fred Astaire. Like his friends Martin Scorsese and George Lucas, Coppola has a sensibility that derives from the tension between dual attractions: these three have all always been drawn to classic Hollywood film language and production values, but also to higher-than-average levels of personal expression.

Rather, he has lost and found himself over and over again. In the more than fifty years of his quest-with an artist such as this one, to speak in terms of a “career” seems insultingly reductive-Francis Ford Coppola has gone through many profound changes, but he has never reinvented himself.

And too often the mere adoption of a persona is given the weight of metamorphosis. First, there’s the philosophically dubious idea that one consciously invents a self at all. Over the years, both critics and consumers have taken that notion too much at face value, I think. Contemporary artists are frequently lauded for “reinventing” themselves.

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