Out of the Blue (1980, Dennis Hopper) is a punk Sirkian melodrama with the kind of vitality that’s found in so very few films. It grips you by the shoulders and knees you in the groin. It’s the uh stuff that independent is made of—a work of art baring its anguished soul with attitude.
But more than anything, Out of the Blue gives focus to the performances of its actors. Mostly Linda Manz. What do you think of when you think of independent film? I would dare to anticipate your answer is based on an attitude. Something that defies mainstream. Out of Blue got me thinking about where independent cinema started again. This wouldn’t be the first time. For me the first independent movie is Othello (1952, Orson Welles). Many or most people say Cassavetes was the first. A commonality through Welles, Cassavetes, and Hopper is they started out as actors. And anyone can see the performances in their best work as directors is astonishing. Like Cassavetes, the authenticity in the performances of Manz and Hopper in Out of the Blue are dynamically from the gut, defy the formality of coming off as scripted or rehearsed, and exhibit a volatile mix of vulnerability and vitriol. My awestruck attention went from jawdropping to cringing to euphoria to nauseating to congratulatory for their courage.
What struck me about Out of the Blue is that as a youth picture it captures so well the restless wandering reality of what it’s like to go out looking for something like fun or excitement and the random encounters you find. From dangerous to depraved. And so much of it fueled on alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, and junk food. But it paints such a vividly realistic sense of the streets. And it’s some of these scenes, the ones that don’t serve the plot, that stand out as most effective. Like the quick bit where the Linda Manz character is walking the streets in the daytime and there’s the middleaged guy with bad teeth garbling something indecipherable portable karaoke with a dwarf woman on crutches hanging out with him.
So much of its art is in the spontaneously compelling. Like the scene where Hopper’s character is hitting the bottle at the dump and running around messing with the seagulls, which moves to his daughter, the Manz character hanging out there we see, in his convertible. When he goes up to her the first thing she says is “I just bit a penny in half.”
But as far as dramatic truth goes, there’s nothing light or casual about Out of the Blue. Of course, the Neil Young lyrics it gets its title from’s full line is “…and into the black.” I took it as the alcoholic father and heroin-addict mother are in the blue: melancholy; but their daughter is in the black, nihilism. Or in other words out of the blue and into the black can mean the departure from depression to death.
Out of the Blue is the pure stuff I search for and spend the rest of the year watching the other 99%. It reinvigorated my love of cinema. It restored my faith in independent film. As a work of art it’s given me something new to engage with and begin my attempts to express what it is to me. It’s also one of the few lost films I’ve had the opportunity to see—and in this case impossible to understand how it ever went missing.
12/16/2001 Plaza Theatre
Atlanta, GA
35mm print of 4K restoration (2019) by Chloë Sevigny and Natasha Lyonne
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