Wild at Heart

Wild at Heart (1990)

Genres - Drama, Romance, Thriller  |   Sub-Genres - Black Comedy, Road Movie  |   Release Date - Aug 17, 1990 (USA)  |   Run Time - 126 min.  |   Countries - United States  |   MPAA Rating - R
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Synopsis by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

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, including a seedy ex-marine (Willem Dafoe) who persuades Sailor to participate in a bank robbery.

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Keywords

forbidden-love, danger, ex-convict, on-the-run, mother, bank-robbery, on-the-road, rebel, Southern-belle, betrayal, double-cross