I’m not sure I can quite recommend “Wisdom” as a so-bad-it’s-good film. At first, you laugh over how seriously Estevez regards this ridiculous, hackneyed plot (it steals from “Badlands” and “Bonnie and Clyde,” quite shamelessly), but then the earnestness grows depressing, and you’re lulled to a stupor by the film’s lame stabs at lyrical romance (lots of kissy sunset tableaux here) and the groaningly lame subplot about the town folk hailing Estevez and Moore as heroes. Moore is given nothing to do but react to Estevez, with either loyalty or incredulity that turns quickly back to loyalty. She’s so saintly that she smiles sweetly at Estevez even after the police have shot her in the chest and he leaves her to flee the scene. This is a loathsome, decidedly unheroic move, but the film is too gutless to explore that irony. When Wisdom meets his end–he’s shot in the bleachers of a football stadium–the officer says “You left me no choice,” and Wisdom purrs back “You left me none either,” as the synth swells on the soundtrack. The film doesn’t even end there; it cops out with an “is it all a dream?” sequence.

Estevez has since made more competent films, and I’d love to interview him about this early misstep, but he’s notorious for refusing to talk about the past (he wouldn’t even do commentary on the “Repo Man” DVD, which so angered its director, Alex Cox, that he launched a written war of words). You can just blame it on the folly of youth. As Paul Attanasio (former critic for the Washington Post, now a screenwriter) wrote in his review, “If you cornered Darryl Zanuck 50 years ago and told him that the studio he was building would end up giving entire movies to “stars” barely out of puberty, he might have collapsed on the spot.”

Estevez did make a few brief remarks, in a series of late-’80s and early-’90s interviews, about what he learned from the overwhelming experience of being Hollywood’s then-youngest triple threat (he later directed, wrote and co-starred, with Sheen, in the garbage man comedy flop “Men at Work,” which has at least obtained cult status.) “People seemed to have an attitude about the fact that I got to direct at 23 years old, that such a young guy didn’t deserve so much responsibility,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times in August 1987. “But for me, the filmmaking process was wonderful, an incredible learning experience. Looking back, and I just saw it recently, ‘Wisdom’ is not a great film. It had problems structurally, but it was not a bad film, either. There is a lot in that picture that I’m very proud of, and a lot that I’m embarrassed about. But it’s history, and I’m looking forward to applying the tools that I learned from it.” In 1996, he told the LA Times, “I’m not a writer, and it was evident. These [early] films never had a solid foundation to begin with, and that was my fault.”