Teen actor shines as punk in nihilistic Hopper drama

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This article was published 02/02/2022 (1378 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

By any metric, Dennis Hopper’s 1980 film Out of the Blue is a tough watch, given that it’s about a teen girl trying to find herself while living an often traumatic life with a junkie mom (Sharon Farrell) and a drunk convict dad (Dennis Hopper).

It might be doubly difficult for Winnipeg writer-producer Leonard Yakir, who had been directing it before the film was reportedly taken out of his hands and handed over to Hopper to direct. (Almost half the film’s $2 million budget was raised in Winnipeg.) When Out of the Blue was shot in Vancouver in 1980, Hopper had the 1969 landmark Easy Rider under his belt, but also the 1971 bomb The Last Movie, a self-indulgent piece about a movie shoot in Peru that sends Hopper’s wrangler character on an apocalyptic path. It’s not hard to see Hopper might have seen the film as a path back to the director’s chair.

Under Hopper’s vision, the movie did capture a cultural shift from the hippie ethos of Easy Rider to punk rock’s feverish nihilism, represented by Linda Manz’s character, Cebe.

In the film’s shocking opening sequence, Cebe and her drunken dad Don are riding in Don’s semi-trailer when the vehicle smashes into a stalled school bus.

Don is sent to the penitentiary for five years; during those fatherless years, Cebe maintains a child-like devotion to her idol, Elvis Presley, but absorbs a devotion to punk in general and the Sex Pistols in particular.

Under the handle “Gorgeous,” she spouts punk agitprop by night on the CB radio in the wreckage of Don’s truck: “Disco sucks. Kill all hippies.” By day, she’s barely there at school. Mom, who works as a waitress when she’s not shooting up, is not exactly a paragon of parental responsibility.

When dad gets sprung, a whole new set of problems arise, compelling Cebe to run away from home for a visit to the big city.

Vancouver is not mentioned by name — the film has a vague Pacific Northwest setting. But the sojourn into Vancouver’s punk scene in the early ‘80s is a fascinating/startling little travelogue on its own. As a director, Hopper embraced an improvisational verité style that works best in his street scenes.

It doesn’t always work that well in dramatic scenes, especially those involving Farrell, Don Gordon and Raymond Burr, of all people, as a concerned social worker.

Yet it remains exciting to see Hopper working without a net. As the character of Don becomes more unhinged, it’s easy to see how his acting path would lead to the character of the monstrous Frank Booth in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet six years later.

Manz was discovered by director Terrence Malick, who cast her as Richard Gere’s sister in Days of Heaven (1978), since the young actress had a face that seemed lifted out of a Walker Evans photo gallery from the Great Depression.

She is amazing here, projecting a tough, even bullying front to her fellow townies, and curling up into a fetal ball and sucking her thumb in the privacy of her room. Even though she was rarely cast in mainstream films, her work is memorable in just about everything she did in the ‘70s and ‘80s, including this film, Days of Heaven and The Wanderers.

The film is being screened in a 4K restoration at Cinematheque. It’s debatable if that’s a plus, since the restoration process can give a professional gloss to films that may be better served by embracing their grungy production values. On the other hand, Neil Young’s titular contribution to the soundtrack can and should be enjoyed in its maximum audiophile glory.

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