'American Graffiti': What might have been for George Lucas

I have always felt a certain degree of sadness when I watch movies that revel in high school nostalgia.

 I didn't make the most of that period of my life. I didn't make any lifelong friends, didn't date, didn't drink, didn't own a car.

My memories from my teen years are hazy at best so when I see movies like American Graffiti, ostensibly there's little for me to relate to.

Seeing that the film is set in the 1950s, in a nearly all-white world, and on the West Coast -- I should find even less to love about George Lucas' 1973 breakout hit, but I like it more every time I see it.

Tonight, I got to see it in probably the best possible way -- in an outdoor screening on a cool summer night. The movie itself takes place on a night not unlike this and its ability to tap into certain universal truths and emotions has helped it stand the test of time (as has its timeless soundtrack of late '50s and early '60s-era pop hits).

I could particularly connect with the Richard Dreyfuss character, an introspective, earnest type who feels torn between a desire to stay young forever and the necessity to venture outside of his comfort zone.

Although my high school experience was not anything special, I do remember the anxiety and exhilaration of those days and weeks before I left home for college, and it's comical, in retrospect, how at that time you feel like you've established who you are as a person -- you haven't.

The film also taps into other funny and bittersweet aspects of adolescence -- from the awkwardness of maintaining high school relationships as you transition (beautifully acted by an against-type Ron Howard playing a bit of a jerk) and the tendency to put on personas to seem cool (done to great comic effect by Charles Martin Smith).

What's most remarkable to me about the movie though has always been the fact that George Lucas made it. The Star Wars mogul has always insisted that he never planned to be a blockbuster filmmaker and always intended to make personal movies like these.

Who knew Richard Dreyfuss was so adorable?

Something went wrong though and following the enormous success of the first Star Wars film, Lucas transitioned into becoming a mega-producer and never made a film himself again until the ill-fated prequel trilogy. By the time those films rolled around Lucas seems to have totally lost his ability to craft human, humorous and heartfelt characters -- the kind of which populate this entire film.

Which is a shame. American Graffiti is clearly an extremely personal film. Lucas was apparently a car nut as a young man and liked to cruise his California suburbs just like the characters in this film. They speak their hip, hepcat lingo, while at the same time their bravado betrays their more insecure emotions. Lucas, who is known to have been incredibly shy, at least at the time of the filming, must have really enjoyed revisiting his rebellious youth and playing at being a kid again.

Although this movie couldn't be further from Star Wars on the surface, it too shares some DNA (and I'm not just talking about the casting of Harrison Ford as another charming rogue). Both films celebrate freedom and are about making existential choices about what you are and where you are going. It's heady stuff, packaged in a visually and aurally appealing product.

It would have been fascinating to see what kind of films Lucas would have made had he kept directing or at least if he had alternated Indiana Jones-type spectacles with movies that are closer to his heart.

We'll probably never see that kind of project from Lucas, so for the foreseeable future we must cherish American Graffiti as an example of what might have been -- as a sweet but sophisticated tribute to a bygone era, that had its virtues and its faults.