Nicolas Cage--Wild and Full of Heart

In a way, Nicolas Cage has become crown prince of the darker realms of absurdity--at least in the movies. Think of his wildly contrasting roles in recent years: face pulled into a gawky pompadoured Bobby Rydell cartoon in “Peggy Sue Got Married”; lanky body hunched into the vision of a demented Manhattan blood-sucker in “Vampire’s Kiss”; torso covered in gangster finery and bad vibes as psycho Mad Dog Dwyer in “Cotton Club.”

With these performances and others, Cage has become the odd man out among younger American leading men. He’s the neo-expressionist screwballer, the spooky-ride king. His sheer, flaky comic resilience can be exhilarating. In Cannes Film Festival winner “Wild at Heart,” he hits a career watershed--playing Bogey-man to a whole “Casablanca” of oddball actors: his coltishly radiant co-star Laura Dern, her real-life mom Diane Ladd, Harry Dean Stanton, Crispin Glover, Willem Dafoe, John Lurie and all the others, a rogue’s gallery of bent denizens of the road, assembled under the eerily innocent eye of that master of lyrical, childlike horror, David Lynch.

“David is like a criminal director,” Cage says with admiration. “He’s not concerned with Establishment laws and rules. He just does what he does--and it’s honest . . . . He’s constantly sculpting and fishing. A scene can turn into a comedy or into heavy horror in a fraction of a second. He’s very much a sculptor, a spontaneous sculptor.

“When you talk about various levels in acting . . . the same is true with David in ‘Wild at Heart.’ It’s a very universal film, operating on different levels. It operates on a comedic level. It operates on a real level. And also on that absurdist level. Like, there’s this gritty road movie, this gritty love story on the road, emanating through a ‘Wizard of Oz’ tonality--which gives it more texture and color.”

Atop the movie’s amazingly eccentric ensemble, Cage’s Sailor Ripley becomes the latest in his recent string of ingenious, double-jointed performances. As a free spirit, trapped in another man’s image--in this case, Elvis Presley’s--Cage plays most of the movie drooping himself over things: windshields, steering wheels, tables, even co-star Dern as they lie knotted together in pristine Lynch compositions on the motel sheets. All the while, he displays the lizard-lidded ‘50s cool of a rock ‘n’ roll rebel, murmuring lines in a smoky pastiche of Elvis’ melodically guttural, macho purr. (“ ‘Wild at Heart’ is the kind of movie I wish Elvis would have done,” he says.)

This isn’t just an impersonation, like Kurt Russell’s John Wayne in “Big Trouble in Little China,” or Christian Slater’s Jack Nicholson in “Heathers.” It’s a multilayered turn with separate coatings of parody, pop tribute and poetic in-joke--and he delivers it with the lazy spontaneity of a Tupelo savage midwifed by a black leather jukebox out of a Chevy. It’s a triumph, one of many in “Wild at Heart.” And it may signal Cage’s emergence as the ace--or, at the very least, joker--of his acting generation.

Here’s Cage on the genesis of his career: “As a child in Long Beach, I spent a lot of time pretending I was other people. I was into the whole concept of trying to disguise myself . . . because, in the ‘70s, when I was growing up, that was very big on TV. ‘Toma’ (Tony Musante) was this disguise-artist detective, and I thought that was very cool . . . I used to disguise myself going to school, to keep from getting beaten up on the bus.

“I was in a juvenile delinquent’s school at the time, because I was expelled from regular elementary school for being a prankster. Once, the kids all brought lunch to class and I said I’d bring egg-salad sandwiches. I went to Farmer’s Market and bought five cans of fried grasshoppers and crushed ‘em up, put ‘em in the egg salad and watched everybody eat the grasshoppers. They’d go: ‘Oh! There’s an antenna in there!’

“Well, I got caught and expelled--and I went to a very rough school . . . . And I used to get beat up on the back of the bus, because there were these three big guys who commandeered the back seat. I was in fourth grade, about 9 or 10. They were 12 or 13. So, one day, I went home and I’d had enough. I disguised myself as this character--you know, chewing gum, wearing sunglasses, cowboy boots--and I got on the bus and said, ‘Yeah, I’m Roy Richards, Nicky Coppola’s cousin, and if you screw with him again, I’m gonna kick your ass!’ They bought it. That was really my first experience in acting.”

Cage, of course, is Francis Coppola’s nephew, and, at first, there may have been a feeling that he was primarily Coppola’s nephew--that Coppola’s virtuosity and success had unlocked a Pandora’s box of other Coppolas, including Francis’ father, Carmine Coppola, sister Talia Shire and daughter Sofia Coppola. That, actually, is why Nicolas Coppola, at 17, became Nicolas Cage. He says he didn’t want the distraction, at auditions, of being a Coppola, of queries and small talk. So he took his stage name from a couple of famous, offbeat Cages: comic-book hero Luke and avant-garde composer John.

Then, after working for his uncle twice--in the vastly underrated 1983 “Rumble Fish” and 1984’s “Cotton Club”--Cage made a breakthrough under Francis’ direction in “Peggy Sue Got Married,” as nerdy suburban heartthrob Charlie Bodell. There’s been something bracingly nutty about Cage’s roles ever since. The haystack-haired, mournful-eyed, hapless convenience-store thief in “Raising Arizona,” trying desperately to achieve domestic bliss with a lady cop in a tornado of Southwestern pathology. Or wild man Ronnie Cammareri in “Moonstruck,” a tormented baker, who’s lost his hand to the slicer and his heart to his brother’s fiancee, frantically wooing her with bestial pounces, heartsick stares and tickets to the Metropolitan Opera. Or Peter Loew, the yuppie would-be vampire of “Vampire’s Kiss”--with his despicably smug Long Beach drawl, his twerpy, sadistic persecution of his secretary and his woefully vicious fantasy sex life.

All these performances, on one level, are jokes. But they’re serious jokes. There’s real pain and anguish and a sense of life’s evil forces behind them. Cage, who showed as early as 1983’s “Valley Girl” and 1985’s “Birdy” that he could do primal-man roles with the best of them, has, in the past four years, refined his style. He’s sweetened it, opened it out, shown he can suggest the many opposing forces (good/evil, dark/light, hot/cold) that can beat within a single wild breast. In a way, it’s not surprising that Elia Kazan, master actor’s director of the American cinema, tapped Cage for the lead in his (postponed) movie “The Anatolian Smile.” It’s also not surprising that he’s considering, right now, a major role once intended for Al Pacino: the murderous lawyer in “Investigation,” screenwriter Paul Schrader’s adaptation of Elio Petri’s Oscar-winning 1970 anti-fascist parable, “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion.” “I’d like to do a movie that was politically oriented, next,” he says. “I’d like to rip the mask off American politics.”

In all his recent movies, though, he’s a great, elastic, soulful prankster, twisting himself endlessly into outlandish shapes. Other actors take most of their inspiration from life, or Hollywood movies. Cage gets them from everywhere, from TV cartoons, Cocteau movies, even the diners around us. “I get turned on when I go into a restaurant and I see some guy eating his spaghetti in a grotesque way,” he says, chuckling. “Two years later I’ll incorporate it in a movie.”

He may be the most playful and goofily inventive of young American movie leading men right now. He doesn’t have Robin Williams’ hot-wire free-association wizardry, Sean Penn’s manic intensity, Michael Keaton’s razzle-dazzle spontaneity or Denzel Washington’s buttery cool. But, in some ways, he comes up with more startling choices than any of them.

“I don’t really know what it is that I do, as an actor,” he tries to explain. “I get an image or an idea--and I crystallize it, try to imitate it, make it come to life. Get a visual image first.”

Cage’s characters often suggest the swoony survivors of a generation besotted by media: the kids whose body style and ideas were set not by their parents or community, but by TV, movies, radio, rock ‘n’ roll. He often patterns his performances on images he’s culled out of culture, high and low. In “Wild at Heart,” it’s Elvis. In “Birdy,” perhaps Brando or Al Pacino. In “Peggy Sue Got Married,” he used the voice of a Claymation horse on “The Gumby Show.” In “Moonstruck,” wild Ronnie is slightly based on the beast of Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast.” In “Vampire’s Kiss,” his weirdo bent-body English is obviously modeled on gaunt, spectral Max Schreck, star of F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent horror classic “Nosferatu.”

In every case, Cage himself dreamed up these dual-level images. The directors may have encouraged him, or moderated him, but they always let him play. “I don’t want to dig a hole and say that I always want to be abstract or expressionistic,” he says now. “It’s just that, at those times, I was doing something that appealed to me,”

Cage’s borrowing from the past makes him, in some ways, both a throwback and an unusually modern movie actor. His “expressionism” connects with the super-media era of electronically manufactured politicians and stars, where teen-age kids in the transcontinental TV web all try to turn themselves into fake rock stars and movie hunks and sexpots. Like them, Cage pulls models from media, but weirder ones.

Fakery is part of his take on American character, an attitude he shares with the young California or second-generation actors he came up with in the ‘80s: Sean Penn, Emilio Estevez, Charlie Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland, Robert Downey Jr., Crispin Glover (a schoolmate at Beverly Hills High) and others. These actors, growing up with few illusions about the movie industry, radiated a hip irony that could sometimes be read as nihilism.

It wasn’t necessarily a bad attitude to have, especially in the ‘80s, with the decade’s surplus of doltish teen-age movies. If these newcomers sometimes modeled themselves on older actors--Sheen, Sutherland and Estevez on their fathers, Penn (whom Cage calls an “inspirational” figure) perhaps on Robert De Niro--it may have been a way of asserting integrity, even borrowed integrity, in the face of utter foolishness.

And if, right now, it’s Cage who made a leap forward, it may be because of his decision to turn himself, very early, into a character lead. He doesn’t really play the movie star game any more--with the exception of a recent, misfired commercial hedge, “Fire Birds.” Nowadays, he doesn’t even overuse his prime actor’s physical asset: those big, haunted, moonlike eyes, which, paradoxically, often make him look both pensive and explosive.

“Sailor is a romantic, I wanted that,” he says. “I wanted the love story aspect of ‘Wild at Heart’ to be strong--to have a pure love in this hellish world that they’re surrounded with. So did David. Actually, David’s one of the . . . warmest people I’ve ever met. I think he has that poetry inside of him that believes in true love . . . and some of the more delicate things in life. And he’s rooting for them . . . to survive.”

Cage is an actor who relishes both dead-on honesty and silliness--he delighted in the “playfulness” on the “Wild at Heart” set--as well as raw passion and true love, the delicate things. He’s a comical lamb in lone wolf’s clothing, a Long Beach Heathcliff who keeps looking for banana peels to step on. And he’s also a full-blown romantic--a quality he’s shown ever since “Valley Girl,” where he played a moony street kid pursuing a desperate passion for a rich San Fernando girl, whose snobby friends considered him a Hollyweird creep.

In fact, Cage’s romanticism is his most attractive quality. Like the young Jimmy Stewart, he is unafraid of showing desire and passion on screen--and he doesn’t mind looking nerdy or grotesque doing it. In “Moonstruck,” when, after a series of outrageous, self-pitying tantrums, he rises to confront his brother’s fiancee (Cher) and then sweepingly tosses the table outside, grasps her in a ravenous clinch and carries her off to the bedroom, it’s an ultimate post-Stanley Kowalski joke--and both Cage and Cher delightedly let us all in on it. In “Vampire’s Kiss” he shows us--through his scaldingly funny portrait of Loew, the quintessential me-first yuppie creep--just how deranged promiscuity in modern New York can get.

“On ‘Vampire’s Kiss,’ I choreographed, more or less, everything,” Cage explains. “I was just off in my own world. With ‘Wild at Heart’--being that I trusted Laura . . . and David so much--I could let my guard down, and be more spontaneous, free-flowing. I wasn’t blocked into anything. At all.”

“Wild at Heart” isn’t as serene and scary as David Lynch’s previous “Blue Velvet.” It’s a going-nowhere-fast movie, and there’s something almost demonically unsettling about its mixture of wild forward motion and seeming stasis. But at its center, a luminous core, are these two vibrantly goofy, love-drunk performances by Cage and Dern.

That’s what puts the movie in a continuum with most of his best work. In “Wild at Heart,” as in “Valley Girl,” “Raising Arizona” and “Moonstruck,” he’s playing a romantic overreacher, grabbing above his station for a seemingly impossible love--and paying all kinds of horrific/absurd consequences. And, though it may seem peculiar to say this of a movie chock full of bizarre violence and weirdo Angst, one that barely escaped the MPAA’s dreaded X rating, what makes “Wild at Heart” most memorable is that burst of sweetness, that pure, seraphically dopey love of Sailor and Lula shining out in an awful darkness.

“(Sailor) is like an old Corvette in a snakeskin jacket,” says Cage. “He breaks down, he starts up, he breaks down. When he’s driving, he drives fast and he drives cool, but he needs a tuneup. And even though he would beg and steal--like in that Elvis song--even though he killed a man, he did it because of love. He felt he was doing the right thing, even though it was pretty screwed up. There’s not a lot of rationality between his instincts and his actions.”

Over all of Cage’s recent roles, mixed with his loopy romanticism, lies his attraction to dark forces, shadows, everyday horror, the beast in all of us. He’s a devotee of horror-film imagery, but he doesn’t make the mistake of consigning horror to a stylized realm of insatiable slashers and blood-gorged monsters. When he summons up an eerie movie image from the past, he’s trying to connect it to the present, strike a metaphor for the dread all around and inside us. That’s what he’s going after in “Vampire’s Kiss,” his most radical and inventive performance, and one which he says was mutilated by editing that eliminated 10 or 15 crucial minutes from the film. That’s what he gets in “Wild at Heart,” a masterpiece of playful American pathology. He’s an actor who likes to howl--and, at the same time, to shoot us a wink over the howl, like some lovable but fiendish-looking puppetmaster.

“Well, I don’t want to become the next Boris Karloff,” he says. “And I’m not saying that because I don’t like Boris Karloff. I think he’s great, he’s the master . . . . But, listen: ‘Apocalypse Now’ was a horror movie, you know? So was ‘Wild at Heart.’ So was ‘Vampire’s Kiss.’ And the thing is, you can make a horror film out of everyday life. You can make a horror film out of Vietnam. You can make a horror film about two lovers on the run. And those are the real horror films, the ones that scare me.

“It’s just what I’ve been attracted to ever since I can remember . . . . I’ve met this girl who’s really into bats and spiders and skulls. She’s a very sweet person but . . . she’s into exactly the same kinds of things that I’m into. I like that kind of spooky-house, spooky-ride style of living. That’s basically what I am, I guess. I’m a man in search of a spooky-ride style of living!”