A stylish, fast-moving, gut-wrenching melodrama of hell-bent youth: a loose knit company of teenage crazies in the milieu of motorcycles, heroin, mean streets and pool rooms of Tulsa,Oklahoma.

They are alienated from society at large, family,peers, lovers, siblings—yet needing them. Lacking a confident centre to their lives, their subjectivity collapses in on itself; their behaviour becomes more compulsive, eccentric and destructive. The fish of the title are a species whose males are driven to fighting frenzy by the sight of another male of their ownkind—or even their own reflection. Burum's black and white cinematography and Copeland's percussive music, enhanced by Dolby, are powerful factors in Coppola's artistic plan.