Part of Arkadin’s LYNCH AT 75 series, celebrating the work of filmmaker David Lynch

Even by the outlandishly weird standards of David Lynch, Wild at Heart is one crazy, unhinged ride. Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, the film is a danger-laden desert road tour of the filmmaker’s personal obsessions: erotic violence, twisted noir tropes, surrealistic symbology, and dark-hearted Americana. Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern play Sailor Ripley and Lula Pace Fortune, two lovers on the run from Lula’s overbearing mother (Dern’s real-life mother, Diane Ladd in an Oscar-nominated performance) and the seedy psycho gangsters she hires to track down and kill Sailor. By turns sexy, scary, satirical, and supremely ridiculous, Wild at Heart is a work of unruly passions, contrasting Sailor and Lula’s freewheeling libidos with the gleeful malevolence of their ultra-creepy “black angel” pursuer, Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe). Clad in a snakeskin jacket and drawling like Elvis, Cage is at his most intensely genuine, while the always-vivid Dern struts around like a ferociously liberated Marilyn Monroe. Together, they form one of cinema’s most madly perfect romantic pairings, a fiery anchor for the wild and whacked-out indulgences that surround them.