Divine Comedy for the '80s

By RICHARD CORLISS

The Lying Woman (Jo Harvey Allen) leans across the restaurant table and confides that the reason for her amazing psychic powers is that she was born with a tail. Yes! Her mamma had it surgically removed and kept it in the medicine cabinet, "right between the 4-Way Cold Tablets and the monkey blood." Which is about where, in the cinematic scheme of things, True Stories fits. Right between a 4-H rally and the Monkees' Head. Between Dallas and Paris, Texas. Between Charles Kuralt and Fellini. Between David Letterman and David Lynch. Between everything you forgot about rock movies and nothing you quite expect.

In 1955, as Bill Haley's Rock Around the Clock throbbed through The Blackboard Jungle, rock-'n'-roll hit movies with the force of a party doll at a quilting bee. Each form cheerfully exploited the other; neither was ever quite the same. By the '60s, movies were an indispensable tool for marketing any hot new group. Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night pinned the larkish wit of four Liverpudlians on top of the world; Bob Rafelson's Head (co-written with Jack Nicholson) was a brilliant, bilious suicide note from the Monkees to their die-hard fans. Today rock helps sell nonrock pictures from Top Gun to Rocky IV. But it took David Byrne to bring the music back to its roots, to secure it in the mouths and guts of his True Stories tellers.

Not to be too modest about it, True Stories is a divine comedy for the '80s, with Narrator Byrne acting as a hip-nerd Virgil to the moviegoer's Dante in this travelogue of the surreal landscape called Virgil, Texas. It also represents the first big-screen flowering of the decade's dominant hip sensibility. Like Letterman with his "Small-Town News" and "Stupid Pet Tricks," Byrne is fascinated by the seemingly banal. Like Lynch's Blue Velvet, True Stories rides the subterranean currents of bizarre behavior that bubble under Smalltown, U.S.A. "It's a strange world, isn't it?" the characters in Blue Velvet keep saying. Yes, Byrne would reply, strange and wondrous.

That nothing much happens during our three days in Virgil -- oh, there's a Felliniesque fashion show and a parade and a talent show and later a wedding -- is O.K. by our Narrator. He wants us to observe the eccentric rhythms of people's minds and movements. A girl in a white dress careers down the empty highway, emitting bird cries, singing in her own language. Civic Leader Earl Culver (Spalding Gray) uses tomatoes and peppers to illustrate a dinner-table harangue on the fragmenting of capitalism; the lobster centerpiece revolves and glows. A middle-age executive, alone in his office late at night, practices a sensuous boogaloo. In the cozy heart of Reagan's America, the renegade spirit stirs. And Byrne is unlikely to care whether you laugh or scratch your head.

Laughter is more appropriate -- the laughter of recognition, not of condescension. Byrne has the joy of a SoHo sophisticate discovering that there are other beguiling life-forms out there, and True Stories communicates that pleasure as ripely as any film made by New Yorkers in Texas since Bonnie and Clyde. A lip-sync contest, to the Talking Heads' bar-brawl rave-up Wild Wild Life, is awhirl with amateur energy. For 15 seconds or so each, a dozen locals -- Louis the Country Bachelor (John Goodman), his pal Ramon (Tito Larriva) and even Byrne in a gigolo's mustache, but also a little girl, a fat woman, a Prince look-alike and his votary (played by Fellow Heads Jerry Harrison and Tina Weymouth) -- get to put on the hit, and each does so with reckless style. Other songs show up disguised as TV commercials, voodoo incantations, 4-H boys' chants, a fashion-show monologue; and in each the down-home naivete of the lyrics twins neatly with the gotta-sing-along tunes. Hard not to have a lot of fun watching this movie.

It is also gorgeous to look at, a triumph of craft and audacity for a novice feature-film director. Top Cinematographer Ed Lachman (Union City, Desperately Seeking Susan) has shot the film with the shadowless clarity of postcards and Polaroids. The Narrator's convertible streaks down the highway like a big red Road Runner, and the Laziest Woman in the World (Swoosie Kurtz) vegetates in a tidy mansion surrounded by the bleak glamour of the Texas plains -- civilization's affront to parched nature. Byrne's framing of the actors, like his sense of humor, is just off center and right on target. It gives all the performers (especially Goodman, who becomes tomorrow's star with his endearing turn as Louis) plenty of room to expand their characters from stereotypes into the deft cartoonery of a postmodern Preston Sturges stock company.

As he developed the screenplay, Byron stripped the narrative of interstices and "intrigue" so that there would be less interaction among the main characters, and the vision of Virgil would be filtered through the Narrator's unblinking eyes. It is through his outsider's eye that the good people of Virgil are viewed. Yet an unusual symbiosis takes place. The Eastern sharpies in the film's crew and the hard-caked rurals whose town they invade get along just fine. Earl Culver and Louis and the Lying Woman and the rest, while remaining very much their idiosyncratic selves, easily form the newest version of a traditional small town. They may congregate in malls instead of town halls, but by indulging one another's peculiarities, they create a sense of community. Why shouldn't the national anthem of Virgil be Wild Wild Life? And why shouldn't the alien Narrator stop by to celebrate everybody's specialness?