Critics reviews

Kaufman’s genius lies in matching these boys’ growing pains with the growing pains of a whole nation in the early ‘60s; the result is a film that’s both deeply lovable and genuinely poignant.

[The Wanderers] suggests a Martin Scorsese movie gone soft and cute. It jumps and burbles, but the stylized, threatening mise-en-scene doesn’t support the fey emotions.

[The Wanderers is] Vitelloni but with the phantasmagoria of later Fellini... A rollicking view of the dead end of adolescent machismo, not nostalgic but cuttingly aware of having "two fists of iron and going nowhere," as goes the tune.

The movie’s kinetic quality at times recalls Walter Hill’s memorable The Warriors, which appeared in the same year. But like George Lucas in American Graffiti, Kaufman aspires to more than a timelessly gritty fable. He is attuned to the epochal transition from the fifties to the sixties... If The Wanderers now scans as a picaresque curiosity, it is a smart and knowing one.

Kaufman’s film is a strikingly thorough portrait of an era and its embittered end... Where The Wanderers stands to eclipse the starry-eyed nostalgia of the likes of American Graffiti is in its willingness to depict the extent of gang violence and frankly portray alcoholism, racism and unplanned pregnancy.

What revs up the movie and keeps it humming is the driving energy of early rock, with its innocent/rebellious spirit, and its theme that teens must find their own ways to love and fight.

The comic indulgence is streaked with hindsight analysis and irony, but thankfully avoids moral schematics as the wonderfully-cast characters confront a world beyond their tenement horizons and, well...wander... Rock history gets its most intelligent illustration since Mean Streets.

The ensemble cast are great, looking beyond their dingy tenements and wondering whether there is a better world beyond. It's also miles better than Kaufman's later offering, the over-hyped Henry and June.

[A] visually extravagant gang ode [that] fell into that too-common distinction -- "cult classic" ...Kaufman manages to infuse his gang fantasia with as much goofy boys-will-be-boys humor as he does pathos.

[Kaufman's] success is due, in part, to his terrific cast, but more because he never condescends to his material... The Wanderers never degenerates into nostalgia. Instead, Kaufman treats rumbles, backseat encounters, macho rituals, and male bonding as the life and death matters they seemed to be. The result: A cult picture that deserves its cult.

Though the conflicting parts never mesh into a coherent whole, The Wanderers is always worth watching. It contains more surprises than a walking tour of Times Square at 3 in the morning: you never know whether the intense activity will explode into violence, scatological humor or even sentimentality.

[The Wanderers] is an exhausting mishmash of styles. [Kaufman] lurches from raw realism to pop artifice to horror-film expressionism. He introduces characters with tremendous fanfare and then gives them nothing to do. The picture is a mess... [and] the violence is a free-form disaster.