His usual tics – crazy old people, flames – are joined by a series of road accidents, demented sex rituals (what the fuck *is* the buffalo hunting bit?) and echoes of Wizard of Oz.

As always with Lynch, the plot is more or less an excuse to dredge his subconscious and no-one has an unconscious like David Lynch. The last half hour, once Willem Dafoe’s utterly repulsive Bobby Peru turns up, is particularly close to Tarantino’s better films and is the least interesting section of the film.īut in Lynch’s hands the material becomes darker and more terrible than Tarantino or Soderbergh could ever have produced. The script is more or less a straightforward Elmore Leonard steal, and it’s easy to see how one of the hipper auteurs who’ve emerged since Lynch would have turned it into a slick piece of entertainment it’s not hard to see True Romance as an ironed-out retread of Wild at Heart. Looking at the film now it’s a much odder proposition than I’d remembered. Certain scenes and lines are still etched on my memory, two decades later. Seeing the film for the first time, in a small local arts centre, is one of the defining cinema moments of my adolescence. Wild at Heart, his first cinema release since Blue Velvet, was trumpeted with an NME cover story, months of press mentions, the mainstream cult of Twin Peaks, and even a documentary based, as I recall, on the fact that both Lynch and Jonathan Ross liked to button the collars of their shirts. It’s hard to imagine just how like a rock star Lynch was at that point.

To the 17-year old me in 1990, however, it all looked very different. Wild At Heart is dismissed as Lynch lite, his one attempt at a mainstream lovers-on-the-run movie fatally flawed by compromises to commercial acceptability in the wake of Twin Peaks. There are the early oddities (Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune), his masterpiece Blue Velvet, then the nightmarish trilogy of Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. Wild at Heart seems to be the one universally accepted dud in David Lynch’s back catalogue.

Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage, relaxing on-set

Laura dern scene wild at heart