I first saw this 1980 film on a grainy old VHS copy from Video Fan on Strawberry Street when I was in high school, and remember being a little depressed by it, while also thinking it was a low budget mess. My how times change.

For so long this movie was lost and hard to find, but after a recent 4k scan restoration championed by actresses Natasha Lyonne and Chlo Sevigny, the film looks better than it ever has. I found myself enjoying (and often laughing) at the brave improvisational acting and oddball writing and editing choices, which director and star Dennis Hopper later said were inspired by Abstract Expressionism and the video work of his friend, artist Bruce Conner. Critics called the movie a spiritual successor to Hoppers early megahit, Easy Rider, showing how hippie optimism plunged into addiction and late 70s nihilism. But I mostly think of it as a coming-of-age, punk rock classic and tomboy actress Linda Manz finest moment, which is plenty enough reason to check out the new version.

Some back story: The project originally started out as an afterschool TV special being shot in Vancouver with Canadian tax shelter funds. It was about a runaway teen played by the spunky child actress, Manz (the memorable narrator who improvised her lines in Terrence Malicks Days of Heaven) and starring Raymond Burr as her therapist. However, the original director and writer got fired two weeks into the production, and thats when things got whacky. Enter the wild-eyed, Hollywood exile, Hopper, still in the throes of a major drug-and-alcohol addiction of bejeezus-belt proportions and not having directed since his underrated box office bomb, The Last Movie (1971). If you dont know much about Hopper, he was a brilliant still photographer with a great eye, had superb taste in collecting modern art, and could be a supremely talented actor when focused. But he was also known in Hollywood as a difficult human trainwreck, exhibiting a feral, almost Charlie Manson-like intensity, especially during the 70s.

Intrigued by the natural acting abilities of Manz, one of films greatest tomboys, Hopper rewrote the script over the weekend while wearing out his friend Neil Youngs album, Rust Never Sleeps, which is where the new title Out of the Blue comes from; the song My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)" also would be quoted years later in Kurt Cobains suicide note. By the time Hopper was finished, the story had been transformed into a bleak meditation on youthful alienation and the burgeoning punk rock ethos, with fuddy-duddy Raymond Burrs part cut out almost entirely and repeated violent, flashback scenes of a drunken Hopper, playing Manz father, driving a semi-truck into a school bus full of howling children. Hopper somehow managed to shoot and cut the film in around 10 weeks.

Manz plays CeBe, a street-smart young girl who acts tough to hide her insecurity and despair about her alcoholic, ex-con father, Hopper, just released from prison for killing the schoolbus kids, and her junkie mom (Shannon Farrell). CeBe idolizes Elvis Presley and Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols and late at night, chants mantras into the otherworldly CB radio of her dad's mangled truck, saying things like subvert normality and kill all hippies. A juvenile delinquent, she roams the streets getting accosted while finding her sense of family within the punk scene, jamming along with real Vancouver punk/New Wave band, Pointed Sticks, who get a nice cameo. But there are also scenes in the film that are truly weird and disturbing; Hopper often appears to not be acting as he incoherently rambles, his eyelids half-open, or rages like King Lear in close scenes with Manz that can feel like revelatory improvisation exercises by two method actors.

As a director, Hopper shows his underlying talent not only with the gritty photography (his early black-and-white photos are some of the best of the 60s) but also by a displaying real trust in his young actress to inhabit the part. The real power of "Out of the Blue" is in Manz disassociated performance, which feels utterly authentic. She would later say the role was very close to who she was as a person; she grew up on the streets of New York, her single mother working as a maid in the World Trade Center. Sadly, this would be her only lead role (as an adult, she had a supporting role in Harmony Korrines Gummo) yet she always shows great instincts and comedic timing, as well as the uncanny ability to express honest emotion onscreen, from rage and grief-stricken loneliness to the giddiness of childhood play. Here, her characters embroidered, jean-jacket look feels like a perfect time capsule; its a shame nobody ever made a movie back then pairing Manz and Jackie Early Haley, whose Bad News Bears character Kelly feels like a spiritual cousin to CeBe. Manz died from lung cancer in 2020.

Another thing that really jumped out this time was how much the films controversial closing scene [too explicit to describe here] foreshadows Hoppers role as Frank Booth in David Lynchs masterpiece, Blue Velvet. Its all right there. No wonder Hopper begged Lynch to give him the role of the psychotic killer, allegedly telling the director, You have to let me play Frank Booth. I am Frank Booth! Somehow by dredging up his dark personal demons onscreen, which he already seems to be doing in Out of the Blue, Hopper managed to sober up and resurrect his career as one of the great villains in Hollywood history in Blue Velvet.

Out of the Blue competed for the Palme dOr at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival, but mostly its been a VHS cult classic shared among friends for years. This new 4K Blu-ray restoration finally gives it the deluxe treatment. Not only does the cleaned-up, 35 mm print look and sound exponentially better (Neil Youngs lonely solo music has rarely been used to better effect in a movie, aside from Jarmuschs Dead Man) but there are over 15 hours of extra features included. Among these is a long, fascinating interview with Hopper conducted by Tony Watts in 1984; the 40th anniversary restoration premiere Q&A with Julian Schanbel, Natasha Lyonne and others; Gone But Not Forgotten: Remembering Linda Manz, a featurette featuring Lydia Lunch and Leif Garrett among others; a short film by original writer Leonard Yakir; a radio spot by Jack Nicholson, who called the film a masterpiece; extended interviews with admirers Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, Philippe Mora, Schnabel and others, that look to have been filmed during the pandemic by videoconference; Dealing with Demons, Brian Cox on acting with Dennis Hopper; an interview with director Alex Cox (Repo Man); more interviews with 11 original cast and crew from the film the list just keeps on going and going, its truly remarkable the wealth of content. Its nice to see one of the most memorable cult films of the '80s finally get its due -- and then some.

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Rental unit: Out of the Blue dir. by Dennis Hopper - Style Weekly