Crossroads was Ralph Macchio's attempt to prove that he wasn't a one-trick pony with the Karate Kid series. The trouble is, he picked a film with almost the exact same premise: young kid gets trained by an old mentor to defeat his enemies. Yet the film manages to tell its story so well that it works.

Macchio stars as Eugene Martone, a guitar prodigy studying classical music at Juliard. However, Eugene isn't interested in the classical stuff. His passion is for the Blues.

One of Eugene's idols is blues man Robert Johnson and he's obsessed with the notion of finding one of Johnson's lost songs. When Eugene learns that Willie Brown (Joe Seneca), Johnson's partner, is living in a local nursing home, he gets himself hired as a janitor in the hopes of befriending the old man and learning Johnson's missing song.

Willie Brown agrees to teach Eugene the song, but only if Eugene is willing to break Willie out of the nursing home and help him return to the south. It seems that the old man has an appointment at a crossroads, where he once made a deal with the devil.

This may be starting to sound like a Charlie Daniels Band song, but the film takes itself seriously and in doing so, it somehow manages to work.

Eugene, of course, thinks that Willie is crazy, but he humors him in order to get his lost song. Willie, on the other hand, thinks Eugene is just a little no-nothing punk who isn't as smart as he thinks he is, but he does recognize talent in the boy.

The film maintains a love affair with the Blues that is shared by the two main characters. The music almost becomes its own character in the story and Macchio has a way of convincing the audience that he really might be that good at the guitar.

The movie climaxes with a showdown with the devil that could have been completely ridiculous, but the film gets us there honestly, so we buy it. The showdown doesn't involve any mystical powers, or fire shooting out of guitar strings, but instead, the devil simply pits two talented people against each other and lets it be settled by which one of them wants it more.

There really aren't any doubts about how it will turn out in the end, or even the way in which Eugene finally overcomes his foe, so the real magic of this movie is in the characterization, the acting and the storytelling.