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True Stories, the movie Byrne directed between ant forays in Texas, promises to introduce its maker's quirky imagination to the widest audience yet. He also co-scripted it, helped design it, acts in it and wrote the score, which, as performed by the Heads, is currently selling fast in your neighborhood record store. True Stories, which opened in New York City two weeks ago, and will be playing in half a dozen cities by month's end, was made for under $5 million, slightly more than the catering budget at a studio Christmas party.
The film has no box-office stars, no sex appeal and no traditional production values. It is photographed in hues that look like a dishware party -- color by Tupperware -- and its biggest scene is a talent contest that concludes a sesquicentennial Celebration of Specialness in the mythical town of Virgil, Texas (pop. 40,000 and growing). Kind of a downtown Our Town, you might say, full of high boho spirits and jokey asides that illuminate with fondness as often as they satirize without malice. But do not doubt it for a second: True Stories is the most joyous and inventive rock movie-musical since the Beatles scrambled through Help!
Byrne in person is unassuming and unprepossessing, a still, shrewd presence. "I've seen David in a room full of people, acting like he was reading the newspaper," says Jo Harvey Allen, who enlivens the movie with her periodic appearances as the Lying Woman. "Two weeks later, he would make some comment about who said what, some tiny detail. He doesn't miss anything." On screen, as True Stories' Narrator chatting to the camera or wandering through the action in a red Chrysler convertible, there is something both warming and ominous about him. The voice, maybe: flat, arrhythmic, dispensing stream-of- consciousness folk wisdom ("Things that never had names before now are easily described. It makes conversation easy") like an old-time pharmacist handing out a Bromo. Or just his presence: decked out in cowboy duds ("They sell a lot of these around here, but I never see anybody else wearing them"), moonstruck and heartfelt, with knowing eyes and open face and sloping, sculpted jaw. Gregory Peck dosed out on lithium. He sure gives you pause. Then he makes you laugh.
"People talk about how strange I am," says the man who dances onstage like a Bunraku puppet leading an aerobics class and ended his last series of Talking Heads concerts wearing a huge white suit cut like a tailored tennis court. "Of course, being inside myself, not having the perspective, I don't think I'm odd at all. I can see that what I'm doing is not exactly what everyone else is doing, but I don't think of it as strange."
Not exactly, indeed. Byrne's band started out in the punk new-wave era but outlasted and outclassed it. His lyric for their 1979 song Life During Wartime has a spooky pertinence that sounds like sci-fi for a perpetual present tense:
Heard of a van that is loaded with weapons,
Packed up and ready to go,
Heard of some grave sites, out by the highway,
A place where nobody knows
The sound of gunfire, off in the
distance,
I'm getting used to it now