Nicolas Cage and
Laura Dern play a pair of lovers on the run in
David Lynch's surrealist road movie Wild at Heart. Cage's Sailor Ripley is a violent ex-convict with an
Elvis Presley fixation who falls in love with Dern's Lula Pace Fortune, the daughter of a rich, but mentally unstable, Southern belle named Marietta (
Diane Ladd, Dern's real-life mother). Just after Sailor is released from prison, where he was jailed for brutally killing one of Marietta's thugs, he and Lula take off on a wild cross-country trip, pursued by his parole officer, her mother, criminals, bounty hunters, and detectives. Along the way, Sailor and Lula have a lot of sex, share their pasts, share their respective obsessions for Elvis and
The Wizard of Oz, and meet a lot of bizarre characters, including a seedy ex-marine (
Willem Dafoe) who persuades Sailor to participate in a bank robbery. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Movie Guide