Tom Hanks has made the kind of career where picking a favorite movie can turn into a pretty long conversation. He won back-to-back Best Actor Oscars for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, became the face of classics ranging from Big and Sleepless in Seattle to Apollo 13 and Saving Private Ryan, and created characters movie fans have carried with them for decades.
But tucked inside that extraordinary career is a movie that may not always get mentioned first, even though, for those who love it, it is nearly impossible to forget.
That Thing You Do! opened in theaters on October 4, 1996, making Tom Hanks’ warm, funny and ridiculously catchy musical comedy 30 years old. It was also a major step into new territory for Hanks: his feature-film writing and directing debut.
Three decades later, the movie still has that thing it had in 1996.
From the Oneders to the Wonders
Set in 1964, That Thing You Do! follows a small-town Pennsylvania band whose lives change after drummer Guy Patterson, played by Tom Everett Scott, fills in at a local talent show.
Singer and songwriter Jimmy Mattingly, played by Johnathon Schaech, has written a slow ballad called “That Thing You Do!” Guy has another idea.
Once the performance starts, he kicks up the tempo.
Suddenly the song has a beat, the crowd is moving and the band (originally called the Oneders, a joke that never quite works as well in print as its members hope) is on its way toward becoming the Wonders.
What follows is a wonderfully compact trip through the machinery of 1960s pop stardom: local gigs, a record, radio airplay, screaming fans, matching suits and eventually a deal with Play-Tone Records, where Hanks enters the story as the calm and experienced Mr. White.
The premise is simple. The execution is where Hanks found the magic.
The cast made the Wonders feel like a real band
Part of what makes That Thing You Do! so easy to revisit is how naturally its ensemble works together.
Tom Everett Scott gives Guy an infectious enthusiasm without making him naïve. Johnathon Schaech brings the ambition and increasingly difficult temperament of Jimmy. Steve Zahn gets some of the movie’s biggest laughs as Lenny, while Ethan Embry’s unnamed bass player somehow becomes memorable precisely because the movie keeps treating his identity like an afterthought.
Then there is Liv Tyler as Faye, who gives the movie much of its heart.
Before That Thing You Do! reached theaters, Tom Hanks spoke at the 1996 Toronto International Film Festival, where the movie was selected as the festival’s closing-night film. Hanks talked about how much Scott, Schaech, Zahn, Embry and Tyler brought to their characters beyond what he had written on the page.
Click on the media bar below to hear Tom Hanks talk about the cast of That Thing You Do!.
Hanks’ comments help explain why the movie feels so loose and lived-in. He wanted the actors to bring ideas to him instead of simply performing exactly what was on the page, and many of those little character moments stayed in the finished movie.
You can feel that chemistry throughout the film.
And perhaps nowhere does it work better than when the Wonders hear themselves on the radio for the first time.
That radio scene captures everything the movie does right
There are big movie moments built around explosions, special effects and enormous speeches.
That Thing You Do! has people dancing around an appliance store.
And somehow it is just as thrilling.
Faye hears “That Thing You Do!” playing on the radio, races to find the others, and before long the band is together inside Patterson’s Appliances, turning up the radios and completely losing their minds as their own record fills the room.
There is nothing cynical about the scene.
These young people have been waiting and hoping for somebody to notice their music, and suddenly there it is, coming through the radio like any other hit record.
The excitement feels genuine. The performances feel spontaneous. And Hanks is smart enough not to get in the way of it.
Thirty years later, it remains one of the movie’s best scenes because it captures something very simple: what it feels like when a dream becomes real for the first time.
And then there is that song
Of course, none of this works unless “That Thing You Do!” is actually good.
It isn’t just good.
It is dangerously catchy.
The late Adam Schlesinger, who would become best known as a member of Fountains of Wayne, wrote the title song. Mike Viola provided the lead vocal on the recording, while Schlesinger contributed backing vocals and instrumentation.
That distinction is worth remembering because Schlesinger accomplished something unusually difficult: he wrote a fictional 1964 pop hit that sounded convincing enough to become a real 1996 pop hit.
“That Thing You Do!” reached No. 41 on the Billboard Hot 100 and earned Schlesinger an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song.
And Hanks had created a movie in which audiences had to hear that same song again and again and again.
It should have become exhausting.
Somehow, it never does.
Each time it plays, something has changed. The first performance is a surprise. The radio moment is pure joy. Later performances show the Wonders becoming polished professionals. Eventually the song starts representing everything the band gained and everything that is beginning to slip away.
A few fun facts about That Thing You Do!
- That Thing You Do! was Tom Hanks’ first feature film as both writer and director, arriving when he was already one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.
- The movie closed the 1996 Toronto International Film Festival just weeks before its October 4 theatrical release.
- Adam Schlesinger’s title song earned both Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations and became a real charting single outside the fictional world of the Wonders.
- Ethan Embry’s bass player is never given a proper name in the movie and is credited as T.B. Player, one of the film’s longest-running jokes.
- Hanks liked the fictional Play-Tone Records name enough that the production company he later formed with Gary Goetzman became Playtone, carrying a piece of the movie into many projects that followed.
Why That Thing You Do! still works 30 years later
Hanks clearly loved the era he was recreating.
You can see it in the clothes, the television appearances, the record stores, the cars, the radios, the old-fashioned promotional machine and even the way a band’s entire career could seemingly turn on one three-minute song.
But the movie never feels like Hanks is simply showing off how much research went into it.
The period details serve the story.
More importantly, Hanks understood that the Wonders’ success needed to feel exciting before their eventual breakup could mean anything. We get to enjoy the ride with them. We see the screaming fans. We hear the record on the radio. We watch them get their matching suits and arrive in Hollywood.
For a little while, they really do have everything they wanted. And then, almost as quickly as it arrived, it begins to disappear.
That bittersweet quality may be one reason That Thing You Do! has endured. It is a movie about a one-hit wonder that somehow became anything but one itself.
Thirty years later, the Wonders are still playing. And yes, that song is probably already stuck in your head.
That Thing You Do! is available on DVD and Blu-ray and through digital platforms including Amazon, and is streaming on Pluto TV.
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