Having failed the entry exam for university, his mother finds him a job as a courier for the magazine Questions of Knowledge.

Ivan and his family are not rich and spend their time on "budget" entertainment, while Katya is a representative of the "golden youth [ru]" with corresponding interests and values.

[6] Shakhnazarov's friend, the aspiring director Andrei Eshpai, who at that time was looking for material for his first film, decided to try to make a movie out of the story.

[10] In April 1985, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev announced the beginning of Perestroika.

[10] In 1986, the script was significantly rewritten by Borodyansky, and, to the Shakhnazarov's surprise, despite the criticism of the CPSU Party Committee, it was approved by Mosfilm.

[10] Other actresses considered for the role Katya included Irina Apeksimova, Marina Zudina, Alyona Khmelnitskaya, Olga Kabo, Yuliya Menshova, Alika Smekhova, Oksana Fandera, and Lidiya Velezheva [ru].

[10] In an interview with the Trud newspaper in 1989, Shakhnazarov said that the film studio employees categorically did not want to cast Dunayevsky for the role, as he was abrupt and sharp-tongued and was even expelled from medical school because of this, but soon everyone agreed that he was the correct choice.

[11] Dunayevsky's upbringing was similar to his character: his parents divorced when he was in high school, he had run-ins with the police for getting involved in fights, and he refused to go to college and got a job as a janitor.

In the scene on the shore of a sand quarry, Denis Dubrovin ("Dan") and Andrei Matsievich ("Tsatsa") performed a breakdance in the "robot" style.

& The City Slickers (a cover version of Herbie Hancock's "Rockit" from 1983) was playing from a nearby tape recorder.

[15] The disco scene was filmed in the youth cafe-club "U Fontana" (popularly known as "Moloko") in the Olympic Village, a fashionable place at the time where breakers often gathered.

[15] On 7 April 1987, in the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya, critic Elga Lyndina [ru] emphasized that despite his modern emancipation and daring sociability, Ivan is lonely, partly because his father left the family, just when his son needed him so much.

[2] In 2014, host of the radio program Radiola Sergei Sychev noted that the film at the time "gained great popularity and introduced breakdancing to young people across the country.

"[4] In 2016, the online publication Afisha Daily interviewed Fyodor Dunayevsky for the film’s 30th anniversary, calling his character “a kind of Brother of the late 80s.”[12] In 2017, Mikhael Agafonov, a journalist for the English online publication The Calvert Journal, mentioned Courier in an article about Soviet b-boys, noting that several scenes that featured breakdancing served as a free dance master class for viewers.