There are some for whom Wild at Heart is the quintessential David Lynch film, while others regard it as a work in which the director is overplaying his trademark weirdness card, and it's possible to sympathise and yet disagree with both camps. A sometimes very violent, sexually charged and frequently bizarre melding of road movie, surrealist nightmare and fairy tale, it also celebrates the power of love to win through against the highest odds and has at its core an almost bewildering innocence and purity. But if this suggests an indigestible Notting Hill-like tweeness then you've got the wrong picture in your head - the love story here is driven not by fumbling embarrassment or dewey-eyed looks of longing, but by a passion powerful enough to carve mountains in two. This is a love story for adventurous adults, something that Lynch goes out of his way to to establish from the opening scene.

It starts like this: as Sailor Ripley and his girlfriend Lula descend the staircase of an opulent Carolina ballroom they are waylaid by thug-for-hire Bobby Ray Lemon, who accuses Sailor of trying to fuck Lula's momma Marietta in the toilets, then makes an unhealthy reference to "that cute little cunt Lula," and tries to kill Sailor with a flick-knife. To the aggressive opening strains of Powermad's Slaughterhouse, Sailor violently blocks the attack, beats the man senseless, throws him down the stairs and repeatedly rams his head into the marble floor until it is a squishy, bloodied mess. That should see off the Mills and Boon crowd. Sailor spends a couple of years in the pokey on a charge of manslaughter with mitigating circumstances, time that passes in a cinematic flash, during which it is made clear that Marietta detests Sailor and will do all in her power to keep him from seeing Lula again. Lula, however, remains devoted to her man and has no intention whatever of heeding her possessive mother's wishes. On Sailor's release Sailor and Lula hit the road on a journey that will test their resolve and the strength of their relationship to the full.

The relationship between Sailor and Lula is central to Wild at Heart and is one driven by passion, a powerful meeting of souls and bodies that feels erotically charged even when the two are fully clothed and standing by a road side. Sex is explosive and energetic, and the well-worn connection between sex and smoking is made through the lighting of a cigarette in massive close-up, the fire of the burning match being both symbolic and narratively relevant. This core reality, as honest and respectful as any relationship in modern American cinema, underpins the stylistic cool of the pair, icons in a world in which only they are aware of it. They always look good, whether driving, standing or sitting in a bar, every move and word having a studied artificiality to it, yet it never feels false - this is how these two are, and in the weird world of Wild at Heart they represent a central stability around which the strangeness can happily orbit. Thus when Sailor meets up with Lula for the first time in two years, he is as excited to see his snake skin jacket ("a symbol of my individuality and of my belief in personal freedom") as he is to be reconciled with his girl - once his image is complete, so is he. The pair represent a fantasy of idealised rock 'n' roll hipness in an imperfect and dangerous world - he is tough and alluring, she is hot and defiant, together they are emotional and sexual dynamite, refreshingly open and honest about their feelings and desires and brimming over with cool. Man, facsimiles of the two even appeared a few years later in a Cadbury's Heroes commercial - what other David Lynch feature could give birth to something that the ad men would actually consider marketable? (Actually, I've always fancied the idea of Henry Spencer biting the heads off Jelly Babies, but that's another story.)

It really is the performances that sell the characters here, so let's talk about the two leads for a second. Nicholas Cage is, to say the least, unpredictable. He can be wildly over-the-top - Snake Eyes or, God forbid, Captain Corelli's Mandolin - or wonderfully underplay a role, as in Leaving Las Vegas and Adaptation, and as a producer he was so mesmerised by E. Elias Merhidge's extraordinary avant garde mindfuck Begotten that he hired him to direct Shadow of the Vampire. In many ways Sailor Ripley is the perfect role for Cage, a chance to play a character that is larger than life but still anchored in an emotional reality, a man who is one part Bruce Lee, one part James Dean and a whole dollop of Jailhouse Rock-era Elvis Presley. It's perfect casting - having seen the film, you can't imagine any other actor playing the role: Nicholas Cage IS Sailor Ripley.

And what of Laura Dern, whose fortunes seem to have been strangely fleeting? She was all very well looking wide-eyed at dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, but check out Citizen Ruth to see just what a fine comic actress she can be given the right role. Little about her debut in Lynch's Blue Velvet prepared us for the extraordinary confidence and boldness of her portrayal of Lula - here Dern is a compelling screen presence, independently minded, sexually charged and resilient. Completely and utterly devoted to each other, Lula and Sailor are one of the most instantly likeable couples in modern cinema, and without question the hippest.

If Sailor and Lula are an exaggeration of reality, then just about everyone else in the film falls into categories ranging from the oddball to the downright insane. Though this provides a series of typically Lynchian scene-by-scene delights, there is a sense overall that where the strangeness of Blue Velvet and Lost Highway had a very specific purpose, here it feels almost as if Lynch has used the concept of a love story in a world where things were "falling apart, getting crazier by the day" to have surrealistic fun, in the process seeing just how many peculiar characters and situations he can cram into one film. This makes it at times play like Twin Peaks on acid, with actors from that and the director's other works popping up to do sometimes very memorable guest spots: David Patrick Kelly hovers in the background as a gangster's henchman, Freddie Jones talks in a high pitched voice about the problem with pigeons, Sherylin Fenn (in a genuinely disturbing and strangely realistic scene) is the badly injured survivor of a car crash obsessed with finding her lost bobby pin, Isabella Rossellini glides in as Sailor's ex-girlfriend, Jack Nance plays a half-mad ex-rocket scientist, and Grace Zabrinski does a manic, nightmarish turn as the voodoo driven contract killer Juana. Though there are, as you'd expect, some dark elements to the film, there are times when this gives way very effectively to Lynch's fondness for oddball comic moments - the wide-eyed, crutch-weilding hotelier, for instance, who suggests "Well, perhaps we should contact a local law enforcement officer!" in an outraged, upper crust English accent never fails to prompt a guffaw from me.

Though many characters are randomly encountered, as many other are interconnected, and their existence and dark purpose becomes gradually (though only ever partially) clear as the narrative progresses. Their entry into the story is triggered by Marietta (marvelously played by Diane Ladd, Laura Dern's actual mother) who, furious at her daughter's decision to run off with a man she loathes, engages ageing private detective Johnnie Farragut (the fabulous Harry Dean Stanton) - a man hopelessly devoted to her - to hunt out the location of the pair. Immediately uncertain that Farragut is up to the job, Marietta then contacts gangster and sometime lover Marcello Santos to hunt Sailor down and kill him. Santos works for the mysterious and powerful Mr. Reindeer, from whom he requests two hits, one on Sailor and the other on Johnnie Farragut, for whom Santos has nothing but contempt. Reindeer engages the batty Juana to take care of Johnnie, while Sailor becomes the target of the psychotic Bobby Peru.

Ah yes, Bobby Peru. I think I would be pushed to come up with a single character in all of American movie history as genuinely, unpleasantly sleazy as Mr. Peru. Played with horrible relish by Willem Dafoe, he is an almost cartoon representation of amoral temptation and intimidation, with his greasy looks, stubby, worn down teeth and loudly juvenile attitude to women and bodily functions. Yet like Frank Booth in Blue Velvet, there is a worrying truth at the character's core, something recognisable and detestable that makes every encounter with him an uncomfortable one. This is never more blatant than in the scene in which he verbally rapes Lula - shot in squirm-inducingly huge close-up, the sight of Peru's horrible mouth and quivering lips, especially on a cinema screen, is an image that stays with you but that you want desperately to wash from your brain.

If the film bristles with striking scenes, Lynch does not always bring them together with the same sense of purpose as he did in Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway or Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and occasionally breaks with tradition by adapting imagery and iconography from other sources, including his own work: the dankly decorated, vomit-stained motel room in which Sailor and Lula find themselves as their relationship is tested to the max can't help but recall the bleakness of Henry Spencer's apartment in Eraserhead; several direct references are made to The Wizard of Oz (a film Lynch loves), and a strikingly surreal moment involving a dog and a human hand from the opening scene in Kurosawa's Yojimbo is recreated towards the film's end. The script, of course, was itself an adaptation of Barry Gifford's novel, but the author freely admits that Lynch has taken the source material and run with it - Wild at Heart may have been a Barry Gifford novel, but it sure as hell is a David Lynch film, and there is so much striking imagery, so much atmosphere and so many wonderfully wild ideas here that even the more obvious references feel somhow like they are being played for the first time.

Wild at Heart is true to its most oft-quoted line, being most definitely "wild at heart and weird on top," and if it lacks the narrative power and purpose of Lynch's best works then it pretty much makes up for this by way of its compelling characters, Lynch's consistently inventive use of sound and imagery and for a slew of extraordinary individual scenes. That these do not gel into a perfect whole is perhaps not really a problem, given the dream-like nature of the work, and it's still leagues ahead of most other contemporary American cinema - in its daring, its imagination, and its gorgeously unforced cool. It is, in all that is positive in that term, the very essence of high profile cult cinema. And you know what? - it's also a fucking great love story.

Sound and Vision

On the extras Lynch talks about the problems they had with the first print they were preparing for this DVD and how MGM - "Bless them" - sprung for a spanking new peint from the original negative, which was then painstakingly colour corrected and timed for the DVD release. An my was it worth it. OK, there are a few compression artefacts on areas of single colour in darker scenes, and some grain is visible here and there, but on the whole this is a gloriously good transfer - pin sharp, with great colour reproduction and a very nice contrast range. Black levels are spot on. Trust me, the screen grabs here do not come close to showing just how nice a print this is. Full marks to those at MGM who greenlighted this remaster, and to those who painstakingly carried it out.

The 5.1 sound sits mainly at the front, which is a shame, but otherwise this is a tasty mix, with fine use made of the lower frequencies for sinister rumbles, gunshots, the darker notes in Angelo Baldalamenti's typically evocative score, and the big close-ups of striking matches, which almost sound, as Willem Dafoe says in the extras, like an bomb going off.

Extras