It starts in Cape Fear and it ends near Oz, and along the way it rips through Big Tuna, Graceland and Hell. David Lynch‘s incredible road movie, about how Nicolas Cage’s snakeskin-jacketed ex-con Sailor and Laura Dern’s Lula take their hunk of burning love on the run on the road through a pestilent, bright and dark Deep South, owned cinema in 1990. Some carped that this audacious pulp odyssey was simply Lynch doing Lynch; the rest of us couldn’t tear our eyes from the screen long enough to listen to them moaning.

Made while he was working on Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart was Lynch’s first movie since Blue Velvet, and transformed the private, inward-burrowing energy of that film into an enormous Pop explosion, while retaining its interior nature. If you’re looking for critical labels, that old rag post-modern applies, but hold your breath as Willem Dafoe’s tooth-rotted Bobby Peru commits terrible verbal assault on Dern, and you realise this is no reflexive game, this is raw danger.

It’s adapted from Barry Gifford’s fine noir novel, but Lynch crams the thing with his own stray notions. You could take any section and marvel, but one fifteen minute stretch deserves to be played over and over like a record: Harry Dean Stanton’s achingly human private eye in a car at night, listening to Them at high volume; ghostly New Orleans; a tiny plastic belly-dancing mermaid; Freddie Jones digging jazz and philosophising in a scorched helium voice about filthy pigeons; Koko Taylor singing ‘Up in Flames’; Laura Dern, “hotter than Georgia asphalt”; Gene Vincent; Dianne Ladd applying lipstick; Crispin Glover wearing a filthy Santa suit and cockroaches; a gorgeous desert stop as Dern fills up at a dusty highway garage, while an ancient attendant blows kisses and shuffles his foot to ‘Smoke Rings.’

Voodoo, sex, flames, violence, gangsters, exploitation movie nods, smoke, twanging rock and roll, Richard Strauss and the phantom of Elvis – and at heart, the purest love story. This film is like a movie adaptation of a Cramps album. At this moment, I can think of no higher praise.