James Dean’s Performance Anxiety

James DeanSeptember 30-October 6 at Film Forum
Perhaps it’s because he starred in a film entitled Rebel Without a Cause (1955), perhaps because he was an inveterate auto racer who perished when he crashed his Porsche just a month before the film’s release, but for some reason, society remembers James Dean as the embodiment of “cool,” a rebel, even a delinquent teenager. By the mid-1950s, the concept of “masculinity” was undergoing a change even among Hollywood