David Byrne's obtainment of a director's hat, in addition to his on-screen cowboy hat, does not quite signal the transfusion of fresh blood and fresh ideas which rock-and-rollers everywhere must feel sure Hollywood could use from them. His True Stories, neither exactly true nor stories, is modestly subtitled, with tongue planted as disfiguringly in cheek as a baseballer's tobacco plug, "A film about a bunch of people in Virgil, Texas." And in truth it is little more than that, a sort of sketch-book in cartoon style of the citizenry of a mythical and typical American small town, with perhaps a disproportionate number of pages given over to a desperate wife-hunter (John Goodman) who bears a faint resemblance to Jerry Falwell: the beady eyes, the pursed lips that seem to proclaim their absolute inability to eat one more bite, and the general posture that tells of a raging inner debate on the merits of Alka-Seltzer vs. Rolaids. The absence of trueness in any of this is nothing to carp at. Quite the contrary. And if anything, there is perhaps too much of the stuff here and not enough of its opposite. Were Byrne only a little more inclined toward invention, had he availed himself just a little less of the most well-documented artifacts of American kitsch, or had he at least availed himself of these with a little sharper and more differentiating eye, the level of effort in the movie might have risen more often above that of a city slicker suppressing a smirk among rubes. The absence of stories need have been no problem either, although the presence of these can sometimes come in handy in sustaining interest in the absence of the above-mentioned inventiveness. No: the real problem is that the prevailing tone of deadpan impishness, though it might get by in a film-clip interlude on Saturday Night Live or the David Letterman show, does not wear well over feature length. And this is impishness, at that, that weighs somewhere around two tons. (1986) — Duncan Shepherd
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