Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern play a pair of lovers on the run in David Lynch's surrealist road movie Wild at Heart. Cage's Sailor Ripley is a violent ex-convict with an Elvis Presley fixation who falls in love with Dern's Lula Pace Fortune, the daughter of a rich, but mentally unstable, Southern belle named Marietta (Diane Ladd, Dern's real-life mother). Just after Sailor is released from prison, where he was jailed for brutally killing one of Marietta's thugs, he and Lula take off on a wild cross-country trip, pursued by his parole officer, her mother, criminals, bounty hunters, and detectives. Along the way, Sailor and Lula have a lot of sex, share their pasts, share their respective obsessions for Elvis and The Wizard of Oz, and meet a lot of bizarre characters. Inevitably, the voyage ends in tragedy, as a seedy ex-marine (Willem Dafoe) persuades Sailor to participate in a bank robbery. Lynch's direction is more flamboyant than in the past, yet he still keeps an ironic distance from his characters, which prevents the story from being truly involving. Still, his cult followers will find enough fine visuals and jokes to make Wild at Heart a thoroughly worthwhile experience.