Too Beat or Not too beat?

Matt Dillon. Cool in black. Cover boy. Teen-dream actor. Jet-black hair. Bone-white skin. The beat look? It can't be beat.

JOHN DUKA

Except to the prescient few, Matt Dillon's debut, in a film called Over the Edge (1978), was not much to write home to Mamaroneck, New York, about. Mamaroneck! Home of the Mamaroneck Beach and Yacht Club. Home of James Street. The bar on the corner. Mamaroneck High. Home of the two-family home. Home, most important, of Matt Dillon and his four brothers and one sister. At last, everything explained!

Matt Dillon! Product of solid Westchester upbringing, of leafy streets and baseball diamonds. Discovered in, nay, plucked from, the halls of his junior high school by Vic Ramos (once a casting director, now Dillon's manager) to star in his first film, and to go on from there not only to stardom but to highwater-markdom, setting, in his cult figurehead, the standard for every other breath -takingly beautiful (or breathtakingly dorky) young male actor to follow. All prince and puppy rolled together as neatly as fresh cigarettes: Tom Cruise in Risky Business, Emilio Estevez in Repo Man, and Judd Nelson, Sean Penn, and Rob "Too Pretty Boy" Lowe. And, in the move from hallway loiterer to star, Dillon redefined his name, forged it anew, a name which the benighted had thought belonged to a marshal from Dodge City.

Ah, Matt Dillon. The pre-king, the one with charisma, the mythic figure, the one the camera truly loves, the one true natural of this stripling crop of actors.

"Yeah, I know some of those other actors," he says. "Like Emilio Estevez. I mean I've worked with them. But I don't necessarily hang out with them."

Dillon alone, with his pseudo-macho swagger purposefully designed to conceal his shyness, his pale black-Irish luminescence, could someday fill the boots left by Gary Cooper, the most pseudo, the most troubled of all male stars. Cooper, once described by Carl Sandburg as "one of the most beloved illiterates this country has ever known." Or, failing that, at least the penny loafers (toes pointing inward) left by James Dean, who was never as tough or as beat or as sweet as anyone thought.

Neither is Dillon. Maybe it's just the way he talks, his words scuffling their way upward from some self-conscious pulmonary depth.

"Yeah, I was aware when I began acting at fourteen that, uh, that there were other young actors out there," he says. "A new group. Everything goes in cycles. You know what I mean. There's definitely a difference between, between this generation of actors and the last and the one before that. Yeah. We're obviously more conservative. I don't mean, you know, conservative. We seem to be more ambitious, more, uh, aggressive."

Indeed. Twenty-one years old, Dillon has made ten motion pictures. After Over the Edge: Little Darlings, My Bodyguard, Liar's Moon, Tex, The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, and The Flamingo Kid.

In these, Dillon represented a new kind of Saturday-matinee idol, and a new kind of movie-ad image altogether: Sue Lyon replaced by a young man, her sunglasses transformed from hearts into wraparounds. The critics inclined to froth frothed. Now Dillon has completed his ninth and tenth films.

"Yeah, at this moment I just finished, uh, I did a picture in Australia, and I just finished Target. Arthur Penn. Yeah, at the moment I'm not working on a film, but I got a few things brewing. Each film is a step for me."

Ten pictures. How did Dillon do it? "I didn't go to college, you know, I just graduated high school. You know, I just didn't have time for college. It was just not something I pursued. I'd rather advance myself according to me. I don't know. Every generation learns from the generation before it, you know, and, like, history repeats itself.

"Like this summer," warming to the subject, "I wanna learn a foreign language and pickuppa saxophone."

Oh yeah.

THERE is a Cool mood blowing on London streets for fall. Out flounce all those fanciful florals; in slouches beatnik black, bohemian berets, and those bongobeat sweaters so loved by the bebop-and-Benzedrine generation. Girls are thinking eyeliner, existentialism, and eccentric accessories. Boys are thinking turtlenecks, poor skin quality, and poetry readings. And though shades are still "like, cool, man," absolutely no one thinks Jackie O when he can think Daddy-o.