Described on the poster and in the opening credits as "A Rock & Roll Fable", the film combines elements of the automobile culture and music from the 1950s with the fashion style and sociology of the 1980s.

[2] Starring Michael Paré, Diane Lane, Rick Moranis, Amy Madigan, Willem Dafoe, Deborah Van Valkenburgh, E.G. Daily, and Bill Paxton, the film follows ex-soldiers Tom Cody (Paré) and McCoy (Madigan) as they embark on a mission to rescue Cody's ex-girlfriend Ellen Aim (Lane), who was kidnapped by Raven Shaddock (Dafoe), the leader of an outlaw motorcycle gang called The Bombers.

The Bombers, a biker gang from another part of town called the Battery, led by Raven Shaddock, crash the concert and kidnap Ellen.

Tom then goes to a local tavern, the Blackhawk, where he meets a tomboyish mechanic and ex-soldier named McCoy and lets her stay with him and Reva.

That night, Tom has a change of heart and agrees to talk to Ellen's manager and current boyfriend, Billy Fish, about rescuing her.

Tom sends Ellen off with McCoy and Billy in the convertible, telling them to meet him at the Grant Street underpass and blows up the gas pumps outside a bar.

The concept for Streets of Fire came together during the making of 48 Hrs., and reunited director Walter Hill with screenwriter Larry Gross, and producers Lawrence Gordon and Joel Silver, all of whom worked together on that production.

Walter knew what he meant—that we were in a great position here—so he said, "We can do this two ways: present an idea now and get a deal done, or write a script on spec and get a lot more money."

[4]According to Hill, the film's origins came out of a desire to make what he thought was a perfect film when he was a teenager, and put in all of the things that he thought were "great then and which I still have great affection for: custom cars, kissing in the rain, neon, trains in the night, high-speed pursuit, rumbles, rock stars, motorcycles, jokes in tough situations, leather jackets and questions of honor".

Gross published a diary from the shoot of 48 Hours which had an entry dated 12 August 1982, the night before filming on that movie started: Walter presents me with a page of notes he's prepared for a new script.

Remember: You had John Hughes at the time, and then you had Coppola making two high school movies: The Outsiders and Rumble Fish.

Gross says that Jeff Berg, Hill's agent, Larry Gordon, and Michael Eisner, head of production at Paramount, "got into some kind of a fight when the script was finished.

[11] Jim Steinman was brought in to write the opening and closing songs, and "Streets of Fire" was replaced by "Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young".

[4] Hill heard about Michael Paré from the same agent who recommended Eddie Murphy to him for 48 Hrs (his then-girlfriend and later wife Hildy).

"[4] Production began on location in Chicago in April 1983, then moved to Los Angeles for 45 days, and finally two weeks at a soap factory in Wilmington, with additional filming taking place at Universal Studios.

[5] All 10 days of filming in Chicago were exteriors at night, on locations that included platforms of elevated subway lines and the depths of Lower Wacker Drive.

[5] Production designer John Vallone and his team constructed an elevated train line on the backlot of Universal Studios that perfectly matched the ones in Chicago.

[5] Cinematographer Andrew Laszlo shot the film with very low light, giving the images a stark, "low-tech" quality.

[5] More than 50 motorcycles and their drivers were featured as the Bombers, and were chosen from 200 members of real Los Angeles-based clubs like The Crusaders and The Heathens.

[8]Due to the choreography and setups in between takes of every scene, the climactic four-minute showdown between Cody and Raven took a considerable time to shoot.

Gross recalls that about five weeks into the 14-week shoot: I turned to Walter and said "This movie is somewhat weirder than we thought...We just didn't anticipate what the combination of elements was going to be.

We had a very conscious design concept of the movie, but I think we didn't fully grasp how strong it would be, in terms of the combination of elements.

The movie's bigness of size—compositionally—changed the meaning of things and made it more of a fairy tale...The Warriors, it was bewoven with a unique sense of realism.

[4]Streets of Fire fared poorly at the box office, opening in 1,150 theaters on June 1, 1984, and grossing $2.4 million during its first weekend.

The website's consensus reads: "Streets of Fire may sometimes buckle under the strain of its ambitious fusion of disparate genres, but Walter Hill's bravura style gives this motorcycle musical fuel to burn.

"[21] Gary Arnold wrote in The Washington Post that as "romantic leads, Paré and Lane are pretty much a washout", and that "most of the action climaxes are treated as such throwaways that you begin to wonder if they bored the director.

"[22] Jay Scott wrote in The Globe and Mail that "when Streets of Fire is speeding by like Mercury on methedrine, the rush left in its wake cancels out questions of content.

"[11] Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times gave Streets of Fire 3 stars out of a possible 4, praising the soundtrack and set design, and noting the "broadly symbolic" performances which embodied a struggled between good and evil.

"[24] Screenwriter Larry Gross said the film has been influential: Whatever is good, bad or indifferent about Streets of Fire, it had a huge impact on other filmmakers.

Nishitani said that, at the time, the team were not "aware of Streets of Fire, but I've Googled it and there does indeed seem to be something familiar about it" but that "this style of story was very popular back then" and many "fighting games made use of it" so "I guess we were part of that crowd!