THE PUNKS IN HARVARD SQUARE have become fixtures as familiar as the leafletters and construction workers. Stationed at the T stop next to At of Town News, these black leather-clad youths with shaved heads and chains neatly part the otherwise amorphous crowd Steer clear, take a peek, then maybe chance another look, but don't gawk-everyone reacts the same way. Yet it doesn't take more than a few peeks to realize there's more to this crowd than roughness. The striking punks aren't trying to threaten--rather, their severe looks and loud music are a desperate effort to impress the hurried passersby, to get more attention that the litter skittering past their army boots.

The main strength of Francis Ford Coppola's new film The Outsiders is the way it subtly captures this particular human misery. His punks are "greasers" in Tulsa. Oklahoma in the 1960s, and their hangouts are playgrounds and drive-ins instead of subway stations. But the outward toughness and underlying sorrow is the same. By following the agonizing predicaments of three young greasers, the film confronts a startling yet age-old reality many adolescents finding themselves inexplicably cast in on-good roles, reflexively challenge authority because it's the only thing they know. One after-noon for Tulsa's greasers trio begins when the oldest and most hardened. Dallas (Matt Dillon), suggests with a smile. "Let's do any-thing as long as it's not legal."

Author excellent story, ably presented by screen-writer Kathleen Knutsen Rowell and director Coppola, sensitively explores the pressures which a tradition of delinquency and a riddling class structure put on youth Broken homes, severe wounds. Murder and tragedy come as brutal but regular doses of hard living rather than critical plot developments. With emotional and physical hardships so commonplace, any period of healing is only a restless interlude before the next spat of marauding violence. When Johnny (Ralph Macchio) sleepily confides. "I think I like it better when the old man's hittin' me at least he knows I'm there," the line is both gut-wrenching and believable. With desolation a staple, a bit of fisticuffs and a dangerous chase add spice.

Violence is the main current running through The Outsiders in the never ending battle against the preppy, comfy Tulsa "socs" (socialites) But what distinguishes this story from others in the adolescent never-do well genre is its poignant examination of the energizing as well as debilitating aspects of the greasers lives.

In still moments, Ponyboy (C. Thomas Howell) can marvel at sun-sets recite poetry and say. "It seems like there's got to be some place without greasers and socs--there's got to be some place with just plain of people." Any by the film's before throwing a punch.

But more interestingly, the film avoids a moralistic tone by showing how the grease and leather can serve as an ironical security blanket. In addition to providing release from harsh home life and bleaker prospects, being a greaser safeguards the characters against further pain. When Ponyboy falls for a pretty soc, she encourages him for a while but then admonishes. "If I see you in school, and don't say hello, don't take it personally." Those incidents, coupled with the tragedy which befalls a greaser-turned-Good Samaritan, show why the greaser alliance can become a useful shield.

THE OUTSIDERS succeeds largely because these troubled characters speak for themselves. This film is not as endearing as last year's film version of Hinton's Tex, the story of a pair of abandoned Oklahoma brothers who provide both support and tension for each other. But it similarly possesses vivid characters developed almost physical professor, the grimmer most abased with his laugh guy role and best at playing it. Both Machio and Howell effectively display the repulsive and magnetic ethos of being one of the boys.

The film's major fault, in fact, is that the young actors don't control more, Coppola captures a few too many brilliant orange sunsets and displays too many young faces against sharp, blue skies for a movie otherwise rugged and right. Although The Outsiders is a refreshing departure from the pretentiousness of Apocalypse Now and One From The Heart, the director could still stand to trim his tendency towards the grandiose. In a movie about youth. Coppola seems to have been tempted to the epic limitlessness of Steven Spielberg's E.T. Carmino Coppola's sappy score and the overly brilliant shots by cinematographer Stephen H. Burum also work against a sense of immediacy and relevance.

In a film dominated by gripping, often painful truth, one character rings especially true when he notes that regardless of the outcome of a long-awaited rumble, "Greasers will still be greasers, and socs will still be socs." "This relentless fact allows the delinquents' ethic to go unchallenged. It goes a long way towards explaining the loneliness and sadness that grips the outsiders in this film and those on the streets today.