Out of the Blue

What do Natasha Lyonne and Chloë Sevigny have in common besides being great actors? A shared passion for Out of the Blue and Dennis Hopper! And thanks to them this rare masterpiece was brought back to life.

“Subvert normality… Destroy… Kill all hippies.” Unlikely star and bantamweight teen tough cookie Linda Manz gives one of the greatest adolescent performances in cinema as Cebe, a punkette whose disastrous home life only gets more complicated when her ex-truck driver dad (Dennis Hopper, returning to the director’s chair with swagger after a decade in movie jail) gets sprung out of the can and comes home, dragging bad habits and repressed memories back with him. A cinematic kick in the teeth set against the backdrop of ass-end-of-nowhere smalltown Pacific Northwest that’s something like Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967) under the influence of the Sex Pistols, and a magnificent showcase for Days of Heaven (1978) star Manz, who died in 2020, but can never be forgotten for the naked feral fury of her performance here.