Sideline Cut: It is funny how things overlap. A week after Hollywood mourned the premature passing of the understated and classy Christopher Penn, the Pittsburgh Steelers prepare for the annual American sporting festival of the Super Bowl. There is a connection between Penn and the Steelers in All the Right Moves, a half-forgotten classic in the genre of sports film.

In so far as the film is remembered at all, it is because it presaged the phenomenon of the Tom Cruise Smile. The Cruiser starred as Stefan Djordjevic, a cocksure, optimistic high school football star destined to play his way out of Ampipe, the dying Pennsylvania steel town where football and beer are the only certainties of life.

The story line is as pure and symbolic as a set of Springsteen lyrics and features all the classic touchstones of blue-collar American life. In some ways it is unashamedly sentimental and cheesy, and, because it was filmed in 1983, it features a chronic addiction to synthesiser music. And it also ticks all the obligatory Cruise motifs: the Cruiser gets to make a drunken speech, he gets to sprint off into the night through the downbeat street of his home town and he gets to learn something about truth and honour.

But for all that, it is a film that gets under your skin in a way that more recent and flashy American football films such as Any Given Sunday and Friday Night Lights do not. The opening scene, a great, panoramic scope of this heartbreakingly grim fictional town, set to the tinny optimism of the Jennifer Warnes's title track, offers as good a summary as any of Reagan's America. It rains a lot in the film, and not in gushing, Hollywood floods but rather with a demoralising, sulphuric drizzle.

And there is an authenticity to the football action that has rarely been bettered.

The story is set around the "big game" against the more privileged school and town of Walnut Heights. And although the optimism in the bars and the gym pep rally all pay homage to the tradition of football in Ampipe, the real motivation for the players on the team is escape, the perpetual American dream of getting somewhere else, somewhere brighter. As Craig T Nelson's Coach Nickerson tells the boys: "You know why we only got 500 tickets for this game? Because we are the Waps, the Polacks, the Niggers. That's who we are."

Al Pacino, for all his Who-Ahs in Any Given Sunday, never told it so straight.

The Cruise is fervent in his belief that he is going to make it out, and the audience knows he will too. After all, he was Tom Cruise, even then.

That is why Chris Penn, who plays Djordjevic's best pal, Brian, quietly steals the show. A promising, hard-hitting linebacker, he ruins his scholarship to Southern Cal when - in true Springsteen tradition - he gets his girl pregnant. He breaks the news to Djordjevic on the night of the pep rally and, in a great scene, Cruise and Penn stand in a glum stairwell, just out of sight of the banners and the cheerleaders and the happiness of the school gym.

And nearly 25 years on, it holds additional power, seeing those two actors caught in that frame as teenagers, Cruise already destined for supernova fame, Penn for some brilliant, low-key roles and a sadly short life.

But it is through Penn's face, spotty and filled with doe-eyed resignation, that the heart of All the Right Moves is communicated. Even though he goes through with the charade of playing the big game and giving the rallying speech, he knows there is no getting out, not for him at any rate. And in a farewell embrace with Cruise on his wedding day, where the pair of them down whiskey (from a silver flask, of course) and laugh at the fuss being made over the wedding, Penn tells Cruise it is just another version of the dream, the illusion, "sort of like when we were going to play for the Steelers".

Maybe it was because a few years after All the Right Moves was released that American football was broadcast over here that the film stays in the memory. It must have been around 1983 or 1984 when Channel 4 began to show highlights of the gridiron game on Sunday evening. The first broadcast featured, unforgettably, the Cleveland Browns and Denver Broncos. It seems hard to fathom now, when fairly much every sport imaginable is at the command of your remote control, but those broadcasts of American football were incredible to behold. For a few years at least, January was defined by the live Super Bowl nights, and on any given Monday you could tell which of your friends had stayed up half the night to watch the show, which usually lasted no more than seven hours.

For a while, American football seemed like it might take off here. People would surprise you with remarks like, "It was looking bad for the Jets in the fourth when they were third and long, but that Boomer Esiason has some arm on him." Or "That was never interference on Marino's Hail Mary."

The Chicago Bears became popular. William "the Refrigerator" Perry popped up in the photo rounds of pub quizzes alongside deValera and Huey Lewis from the News. People talked of Joe Theisman breaking his leg as if they knew his family. Irish emigrants working the sites in Chicago obviously posted Jim McMahon shirts back to their kid brothers, because for a while there were a lot of young quarterbacks knocking about the northwest of Ireland.

And wasn't there talk of the gridiron game taking off here? Wasn't there an assumption that in 20 years we would have some sort of league going? Weren't there rumours that every half-decent intercounty free-taker was on the verge of signing a multi-million dollar contract with the Cowboys or the Patriots? It didn't matter that a set of gridiron shoulder pads and helmet cost more than the cars most of our families were driving.

For a few years, Ireland went Super Bowl crazy. In fact, weren't "Super Bowl parties" all the rage? Can't say I ever went, I would have been too young, but even then they sounded slightly sinister and creepy, and seem more so now.

American football was one of those strange fads that grip this country every now and then, much like the menacing line-dancing cult of the early 1990s. With gridiron readily available on satellite television now and beamed in at more sociable hours, the sport probably has a new Irish constituency, too young to remember the days when you could see Gerry Rice on television but not your favourite GAA team.

But the Steelers feature this weekend, against the Seattle Seahawks, and because Pittsburgh is the classic football town it might be worth catching. I think if I had a choice, I would rather watch the game in one of those ruined steelworks towns than in Detroit, where the game is being played.

And although they probably never saw the film, the stars of this year's Super Bowl would probably recognise something of their past and predicaments in All the Right Moves.

And poor Chris Penn: what a pity.