Wim Wenders’s review published on Letterboxd:
For me, REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE is the archetypal coming-of-age film, and Nicholas Ray is the ideal director for such an undertaking, downright visionary at the beginning of a worldwide youth movement that was triggered by this film. Ray's entire empathy is with his young protagonists, and he knows only too well what their longings are, what they are rebelling against and how much they express their conflicts with clothes, gestures or their bodies. Of course, James Dean was the ideal actor for it (...). It's an interesting exercise, in all the scenes in which the youthful gang can be seen, to look away from James Dean and only at Dennis Hopper, who is always in the middle of the bunch. And he doesn't take his eyes off James Dean for a moment, "listening" to his body language as if spellbound. A new "attitude" is hardly expressed here through dialogue or the traditional generational conflict, but exclusively through the reinvention of physicality, through a new grammar and a new vocabulary, which is already determined by a turn of the head, how one holds a cigarette or even: how one moves around, how one "walks and stands".
Wim Wenders (excerpts from a text for the Berlinale Retrospective 2023)