wild at heart david lynch laura dern neon

Everything that follows is a teenage dream. Smooth Talk opens with Connie on the beach with her friends, waking up from a nap. It’s a fitting, overdue canonization for a film directed by Joyce Chopra with remarkable perceptiveness, and featuring a fully formed star turn from Dern, a multilayered performance that offers some clues as to the kind of performer she would become - and remains, to this day. Now, following a restoration that was the revelation of last fall’s New York Film Festival (and a virtual-cinema run that continues up to this writing), Smooth Talk enters the Criterion Collection on February 23. In reckoning with a career that has often zigged where Hollywood GPS would indicate a zag, many stans fix on her first starring role: 1985’s sensitive and daring Smooth Talk, as 15-year-old Connie, who discovers the ecstasies and terrors of adult sexuality. It’s true enough that Dern’s star persona is less fixed than that of other actors of her stature - she’s not an acteur like Meryl Streep, a plucky upstart like Reese Witherspoon, a jaguar like Michelle Pfeiffer or an MMA girlboss like Charlize Theron. “ Anything seems possible when she’s onscreen.” This was 2019, as newly minted meme queen Dern campaigned for an Oscar so foreordained that her promotional obligations could double as a victory lap, an opportunity for commentators to show appreciation for an actor everyone, paradoxically, agreed was criminally underrated.

Laura Dern “projects vitality and familiarity - we feel as if we know her and like her - but also a wild unpredictability,” the Vulture critic Bilge Ebiri has written.

Wild at heart david lynch laura dern neon