“Kill All Hippies”: The Return of Dennis Hopper’s ‘Out of the Blue’

Restored and re-released for its 40th anniversary, Hopper's third film as a director is a shocking depiction of an unhappy family that doubles as a showcase for the late Linda Manz.

The only thing more shocking than the first scene of Out of the Blue is the last. Released, if barely, in 1980, Dennis Hopper’s third film as a director opens with Hopper’s Don Barnes, a trucker, hurtling his semi down a dawn-drenched street at full speed with his daughter Cebe (pronounced “Sea-Bee” and played by Linda Manz) at his side. Cebe is wearing clown make-up and, though the reason is never explained, Out of the Blue doesn’t give viewers much time to think about it, thanks first to Don asking his daughter if he’s “as sexy as Elvis” as he takes slugs from a whiskey bottle and leans in for an uncomfortably intimate kiss, and then by Don and Cebe crashing  at full speed into a stalled school bus full of screaming children. By movie’s end, Don’s out of the picture, but his impulse to destroy himself and everyone around him still exerts a powerful influence, having been passed down to the next generation. A poster marketed the film as “The Easy Rider of the 80s.” That was hype, of course, but also not entirely wrong. 

This was Hopper’s first film as a director since 1971’s The Last Movie, the much-hyped but little-seen follow-up to his paradigm-shifting debut, and that opening plays like a statement of purpose. In the years when Hopper couldn’t get anyone to let him make a film, he learned nothing about meeting the audience halfway and didn’t feel like he needed to apologize for it. Not that his insistence won him an Easy Rider-sized audience at the dawn of the 1980s. Out of the Blue played a handful of cities in 1980 (including Vancouver, where it was shot), then made appearances on VHS and DVD before fading back into obscurity. It might have remained there if not for a crowdfunding campaign to restore and re-release the film launched in 2019, a campaign that’s led to an ongoing arthouse release. (It’s currently screening in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and New Orleans and making its way across North America in weeks to come, including a stop at Chicago’s Music Box.)

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As with the restoration and re-release of The Last Movie a few years ago, Out of the Blue now plays like a revelation, a film whose forcefulness and daring help paper over its imperfections. Easy Rider ends with an expression of disgust and an explosion of violence. Hopper’s follow-ups offer variations as potent as they are exhausting, often because exhaustion is the point. Jumbled, confusing, and unforgettable, The Last Movie sometimes plays like a feature-length elaboration on the Easy Rider’s “We blew it,” the conclusion reached by Peter Fonda’s “Captain America” shortly before his death. Hopper’s Easy Rider character didn’t get what Fonda was saying, but early in The Last Movie, Kansas, the cowboy hat-wearing stunt coordinator played by Hopper, wanders away from a party in full swing and cries. Kansas doesn’t know why he’s crying, but he’ll find out. After deciding to stay behind after a movie shoot ends in Peru, which he views as a kind of new Eden, Kansas finds he’s just as capable of violence, misogyny, venality, and corruption as the world he was trying to leave behind. In 1996, the band Cracker released a song called “I Hate My Generation,” but Hopper said it first.

He also kept saying it. Unable to get another directorial project off the ground after the failure of The Last Movie (and not widely regarded as easy to work with due to his unwillingness to compromise and a temper fueled by his addictions), Hopper spent the rest of the 1970s alternately hanging out in the counterculture haven of Taos, New Mexico, and taking work-for-hire jobs as an actor. Out of the Blue began as one of those. Originally titled CeBe, it was conceived, as the introductory text that precedes the restored version puts it, as “a conventional family-friendly drama about a troubled girl’s rescue by a well-meaning shrink.” But the film’s producers didn’t like the way it was going, prompting them to dismiss original director Leonard Yakir and inspiring Hopper to spend a weekend listening to music from his friend Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps as he reworked the story into something he could direct.

The finished film still bears traces of its origins as a tough-but-inspiring story of troubled teendom, but they’re now covered in spray paint. It plays like a close collaboration between Hopper and his young star, who’d previously had memorable roles in Philip Kaufman’s The Wanderers and Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, a film whose tone owes almost as much to Manz’s mostly improvised narration as its visual splendors. Hopper tailored his script to Manz’s abilities and interests, including a fascination with punk. Awakening from a dream of her father’s crash, Cebe wanders down to the wreck of his trailer and its still functioning CB radio and fills the airwaves with admonitions to “Kill all hippies!" and “Subvert normality!” and the clarification that “Punk is not sexual, it’s just aggression!” (Out of the Blue’s re-release arrives “presented” by Chloë Sevigny and Natasha Lyonne, who’ve long spoken about their admiration for Manz, who died in 2020 at the age of 58.)

For Cebe, however, these are more expressions of attitude than a design for living, at least at first. In her room she listens to Young sing about Johnny Rotten while surrounded by photos of Elvis. Wandering town, she wears a denim jacket that doubles as a tribute to the King. After a night out with her friends heckling a movie and declaring she hates happy endings, she boldly walks into a bar and orders a rum and Coke only to get turned away. Everyone in town knows her and, even if they didn’t, she still looks like a kid. But when, after returning home, Cebe spies her mother Kathy (Sharon Farrell) shooting up, she runs away from home, setting out for the bright lights of Vancouver.

A more conventional, and conventionally alarming, movie about runaway youth could feature some of these story beats, even as Out of the Blue follows Cebe’s journey through Vancouver’s seediest corners as she gets high with a cab driver who doesn’t have her best interests in mind and then escapes to a punk concert (featuring the well-liked Canadian band Pointed Sticks). That version also certainly could have also featured Raymond Burr, who shows up for a couple of scenes as a therapist concerned for Cebe’s welfare. But the nightmarish tone and willingness to let scenes play out until they become squirmily uncomfortable (and even then just letting them play on) are unmistakably Hopper, touches that grow even darker and more distinct once his own character returns from prison.

Once released, Don picks up where he left off, leaving any expressions of contrition behind bars. In an agonizing homecoming scene he tosses back drink after drink with buddies who’ve gathered to welcome him only to find a stranger in their midst: the father of one of the kids killed by Don in that bus. “There were a lot of other kids on there beside your son,” Don tells him. “Now, am I going to have to meet every fucking asshole like you, man?” Then Don pours most of a bottle on his own head before offering the still-grieving father a drink. He’s a man who’s crawled into the depths of depravity and has no interest in finding his way out.

Don was of a generation that tore down all the rules, and what did it get them? They blew it. Then they just kept blowing it. His daughter bears the scars of his choices and ultimately decides there’s nothing to do but burn everything down. But Out of the Blue treats even her shocking acts of rebellion as gestures of futility in a landscape of howling despair. The film is punker than her punk aphorisms. In the end, what does subverting normality and killing hippies even get you? Just a fire in the middle of nowhere destined to burn itself out. (And even if it’s better to burn out, as Young sings, than to fade away, Out of the Blue finds no comfort in either option.)

In 1983 Hopper brought Out of the Blue to Texas for a screening at Rice University. He followed the presentation with a trip to a Houston race track where, in a performance witnessed by Wim Wenders, Easy Rider writer Terry Southern, and a young Richard Linklater and filmed by a spectator, he performed the “Russian Dynamite Death Chair," an act in which he surrounded himself with dynamite while remaining safely in the middle of a vacuum created by their explosion—provided every stick detonated at precisely the same time. They did. Hopper survived. Rehab soon followed, as did a comeback as both an actor and director. You can only live in a vacuum surrounded by fire for so long before dying or getting out.