Divine Comedy for the '80s

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.