David Byrne's True Stories (1986) is unequal parts travelogue, musical, comedy, and satire that pays tribute to the fictional town of Virgil, Texas and its upcoming 150th anniversary. Along the way, our unnamed guide (Byrne) meets a variety of Virgil's more colorful characters -- some of which are directly tied to the celebration -- including a country singer looking for love (John Goodman), the world's laziest woman (Swoosie Kurtz), a compulsive liar (Jo Harvey Allen), a Tejano singer with unique hearing abilities (Tito Larriva), a civic leader whose family conversations play out like the telephone game (Spalding Gray), and others. Their perspectives, interactions, and performances give the film a patchwork quality knit together by theatrical monologues and musical performances, many of which were written by Byrne for the Talking Heads studio album of the same name.
True Stories is one of the quirkiest and most original movies of the 1980s. That is not altogether surprising, since the Talking Heads were perhaps the most authentic and original rock band since Velvet Underground. Their concert film Stop Making Sense (1984, dir. Jonathan Demme) is justifiably considered to be the most perfectly filmed musical performance to date. That film, like the Talking Heads themselves, was birthed from the New York New Wave underground scene, with true-blue eccentric David Byrne as the front man, driving force, and genius of the group.
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