Out of the Blue’s Teenage Wasteland

Features—

Nov 21, 2024

In a 1982 radio promo spot, Jack Nicholson spoke to the future. “I’m gonna recommend a movie that I’m not in, that I have nothing to do with,” he said. “I’d like to tell the people about a movie called Out of the Blue, directed by Dennis Hopper. It speaks honestly from the heart of a fifteen-year-old girl. Its milieu is the punk scene. For a young person who sees this film, I absolutely know it may knock ’em back, but they’re going to know it’s about a real reality that really hasn’t been exposed before.” He was spot on, more than he could have known. Just as Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) had blazed a path into the seventies, Out of the Blue (1980)—his third film as a director, about the daughter of a drunken truck driver who smashes his rig into a school bus—was a hinge between the decades it straddled.

From the driver’s seat of her dad’s wrecked truck, which is covered in weeds and a torn tarp flapping in the wind, the young punk heroine Cebe (nicknamed for the CB radio she commands) calls out into the highway night, shouting her handle in a radiantly salty, streetwise voice. “Hello, this is Gorgeous. Can you read me?” She’s met with silence, mostly—just as Out of the Blue was in its day. Hopper’s film emerged in a Reagan-era culture that wasn’t ready or willing to tune into the full-throttle odyssey of a teenage girl.

The movie arrived at Cannes in 1980, where it competed for the Palme d’Or with no country, fittingly rootless—“the first entry from Mars,” Hopper later said. Canada, where Out of the Blue had been shot, had distanced itself from it. Although Manz had been considered a top contender for Best Actress at Cannes, this bleakly nihilistic, Oedipal story about a dysfunctional family struggled to find an audience. “No one wanted to touch it,” Hopper told Interview thirty years later. Compared to its punk-film contemporaries—including Jonathan Kaplan’s Over the Edge, Penelope Spheeris’s Suburbia, and Allan Moyle’s Times Square—Out of the Blue is relentlessly hardcore. Embedded even in its most melodramatic moments, even in its flashes of absurdity, is a realism that hit too brutally close to home.

After its premiere, two years passed before it was released in Vancouver and New York. Critics admired the film—Jonathan Rosenbaum described it as “an heir to the mantle of Nicholas Ray’s angst-fueled lyricism,” tracing a thread back to Hopper’s acting debut in Rebel Without a Cause; Janet Maslin characterized it as a “work of affecting, if largely unexplained, intensity.” Soon, though, Out of the Blue would disappear into near-oblivion. A handful of future champions managed to find their way to it on VHS: Harmony Korine, who tracked down Manz and later wrote a character for her in Gummo (1997), as well as Manz’s Gummo costar Chloë Sevigny, and Natasha Lyonne, who found reassurance in the film’s honesty. “Seeing Linda Manz in that movie as a teenager definitely helped me feel like, ‘Oh, I’m not that alone in this life,’ ” Lyonne said. “ ‘There’s a language for the way I feel, and if I can just find the right people, I’ll be okay.’ ” But like a buried vessel of artifacts and messages, Out of the Blue remained underground, awaiting a future that might one day be more ready to receive it.

Producers John Alan Simon and Elizabeth Karr’s 4K restoration of the film—released in 2022 and backed by Lyonne and Sevigny—arrived in a post–riot grrrl, post-grunge, post-#MeToo world it had anticipated, its defiant spirit intact, its darkness undiminished by time. Michael Almereyda, who directed Hopper in the short A Hero of Our Time (1985), observed in Film Comment after Hopper’s death in 2010: “It’s plainly a film ripe for rediscovery, but one measure of its greatness is that it’s probably as assaultive now, as painful and hard to take, as it ever was.”

As critics of its era had noted, Out of the Blue does indeed capture a generational mood, evoked most acutely through its musical references. Dennis Hopper borrowed the title from a song he’d heard on the radio while driving around Canada: “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue),” from the just-released Neil Young album Rust Never Sleeps. The refrain (“Better to burn out than to fade away”) would become the haunting, ominous undercurrent of a story set in the gray-skied Pacific Northwest. Hovering between mourning and rebellion, Young’s song name-checks a handful of toughened idols, including Marlon Brando, as well as two of Cebe’s (“The King is gone, but he’s not forgotten. / This is the story of Johnny Rotten”). Phrases from Young’s “Thrasher” and Elvis’s rendition of “Heartbreak Hotel” recur at intervals throughout the film, signals from the characters’ interiors. Hopper also enlisted the Pointed Sticks, a Vancouver punk band, to play a group who let Cebe join them on drums at an all-ages show when she runs away from home—a singular moment of pure liberation and bliss.

Shooting took place in 1979. Eight years had passed since the savage critical response to Hopper’s The Last Movie, a metafictional narrative about a stuntman who self-exiles in Peru. Since the release of that film, Hopper had also become an exile. The actor Sally Kirkland had filed a civil lawsuit against him for alleged assault and battery on the set of Human Highway, and he had retreated to Taos, New Mexico. When Easy Rider producer Paul Lewis called him up with a part in a Canadian made-for-TV movie about a young girl who exacts revenge on her troubled, abusive father, he signed on.

After just two and a half weeks of filming, with first-time director Leonard Yakir at the helm, Lewis was ready to scrap the entire project, deeming the footage unusable. Hopper asked to take a look and soon realized the script—cowritten by Yakir and Brenda Nielson, with Cebe rehabilitated by a child psychologist at the end—rang false. Such a twisted and complicated family drama wouldn’t resolve that neatly.

Over the course of a weekend, Hopper revised the script, and by the next week he was holding the reins, insisting on five a.m. calls in which he and the cast would hash out the day’s scenes. What followed was a frenetic, five-week shoot, according to Sharon Farrell, who plays Cebe’s junkie waitress mother. In Peter L. Winkler’s Dennis Hopper: The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Rebel, she says:

We were working really late, late hours and stuff, and he drank, and he drank, and he smoked and . . . He started drinking beer at the crack of dawn. Every morning we’d sit and we’d write. It was mostly improv. If you weren’t in that dressing room where he was rewriting that script, you’d just be written out. If someone didn’t show up, they weren’t in the script that day. It was Dennis. Dennis was just brilliant, he really is.

In Manz, Hopper recognized an actor who deserved a story that was as fearless as she was, as willing to go to the edge. Maybe he saw in her a link to James Dean (one of Manz’s heroes), or something even rarer. A year earlier, working with Manz on Days of Heaven, Terrence Malick had asked her to improvise voice-over narration; in response she had cast surreal, apocalyptic visions over his magic-hour images, tuning into the film’s inherent humor and its darkness. While rewriting Out of the Blue, Hopper understood what Malick had too: that one of the young actor’s greatest talents was her ability to intuit the heart of a film more truthfully than its creators could.

Manz was eighteen, and for most of Out of the Blue she’s playing a girl of fifteen. She hollers her mantra—“Subvert normality!”—to anyone in earshot, smokes joints, pounds away at her drums, gives herself stick-and-poke tattoos, saunters through the school halls and down shopping-mall escalators in a denim jacket with Elvis’s name swirling across the back in cursive; she flips off cars on the highway and gamely fends off lecherous creeps her father’s age. But Cebe is also still just a kid herself. In the scene that opens the film, she’s ten, singing “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear” and bantering with her father, Don, who holds a flask in one hand, steers his rig with the other. Their bond is palpably close; they share an unspoken understanding of destructiveness and a heightened sense of irreverence. Cebe’s hair sprouts in a dozen pigtails, her face painted like a clown’s. “Am I as sexy as Elvis?” Don asks, and Cebe laughs him off. “Eh!” she responds, in Manz’s unflappable New York City accent. “You might be!” The camera flashes on the school bus ahead, full of rowdy, costumed kids. It’s Halloween, and these are Cebe’s classmates—but just as this becomes clear, Don’s truck collides with the bus, dragging it down the street with an awful, drawn-out screech.

This is the scene that will replay in Cebe’s nightmares. Five years later, she can’t remember what her father looks like anymore. When Kathy brushes Cebe’s hair and dresses her up to go visit him behind bars, Cebe presses her palms against the glass, gazing at him with vibrating, expectant emotion; Don panics, overwhelmed. Clamping a phone receiver to each ear, one a line to Kathy, one a line to Cebe, he sends them both away, shouting: “I don’t want you to see me like this.” Locked up, her father has existed for Cebe in a frozen fantasy, and when she sings “Teddy Bear” to herself now, it’s a lullaby—a way for her to self-soothe, like her unshaken habit of sucking her thumb. Later, Don is released on parole, and during an impromptu beach picnic that turns into a cold and angry match between her parents, Cebe sings the song’s refrain over and over, as if it could transport the family to the time before the wreck. The longer Don is back home, the quicker things devolve. And as Cebe gets to know him again, subliminal memories begin to emerge, things she’s never told anyone, things she’s not quite ready to admit to herself. Their lives were broken back then too.

Out of the Blue’s last scenes show Cebe growing up, a process as sudden and intense and twisted and inevitable as the sight of an animal shedding its skin. By this point, she has retreated to the dream space of her bedroom. Maybe unconsciously, she knows what’s coming. She seeks solace in her saviors—her drum set, her records, her Subhumans band stickers, her Elvis shrine. Hopper explained: “I wanted to show a girl wanting to be a boy, emulating her father, but still putting on lipstick and be a little ballerina.”

Meanwhile, her mother’s shooting up in the bathroom downstairs, and her dad’s still blacking out his feelings. After the father of one of the bus-crash victims gets Don fired from his job at the town dump, he obliterates the night in a bar, downing shots with his friend Charlie underneath a giant poster of a brooding Brando, stumbling home blasted drunk. The night rapidly plummets as all three grown adults abruptly, perversely, consider Cebe and her sexuality—and the possibility that she could become a lesbian. They concoct a depraved plan to “save” her. “Charlie wants to talk to you,” Don calls out with cheerful menace, but she’s wise to them, barricading herself in her room. Kicking down the door, the men find Cebe-as-Elvis, all shook up in the crooked fake sideburns she’s just drawn on and wearing Don’s black leather jacket. She’s a greaser lion tamer, wielding a chair for protection. As the scene unspools inexorably into a Sophoclean ending, Manz unleashes her anger and angst, her growing power calling to mind Gena Rowlands’s breakdown in A Woman Under the Influence. Ultimately, this story, in all its fury and strangeness, belongs to a teenage girl brave enough to take it into her own hands.

Long after Manz retired from acting, her role in Out of the Blue remained her favorite part, her only starring role, the one she was proudest of. “I’ll always be that character,” she told me in 2014 from California, in that resonantly warm and flinty voice. By then a grandma, Manz kept a shrine to the film in her house; she’d sit there and drink coffee and hang out with her Chihuahua. I liked that she used the present tense when she talked about herself and Cebe—as if she were considering the possibility that the young girl could have escaped her fate. It was clear how intensely she identified with Cebe’s iron will, how closely it matched her own. “I’m just a tough little rebel, I guess,” Manz said. “A survivor, that’s what you’d call me.”

Out of the Blue’s Teenage Wasteland

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