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Screenplay:
Sam Shepard
Story
by:
Sam Shepard & Wim Wenders
Director
of Photography:
Franz Lustig
Editor:
Peter Przygodda
Music by:
T-Bone Burnett
Additional
Music by:
Patrick Warren
Cast:
Sam Shepard
Jessica Lange
Tim Roth
Sarah Polley
Gabriel Mann
Fairuza Balk
and
Eva Marie Saint
Festivals/Awards:
2005 Cannes Film Festival Official Selection
Producer:
Peter Schwartzkopff
Production:
Reverse Angle
Length:
122 min.
Format:
35mm anamorphic widescreen
www.dontcomeknocking.com
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A
farce, a family story, a road movie
Synopsis by Wim Wenders
Howard
Spence has seen better days. When he was younger he was a movie
star, mostly in Westerns. At the age of sixty, Howard uses drugs,
alcohol and young girls to avoid the painful truth that there
are only supporting roles left for him to play. After yet another
night of debauchery in his trailer, Howard awakens in disgust
to find that he is still alive, but that nobody in the world
would have missed him if he had died.
That
morning Howard is absent from the film set. Instead, we see
him galloping away on his movie horse in his costume –
full cowboy regalia. But there is no camera filming him this
time. Howard is fleeing, from the film and his life.
At
an old train station, Howard trades in his costume for the shabby
clothes of an old ranch hand. He rides the train for a while
and then he rents a car. Eventually he catches a Greyhound,
after discarding his credit cards and cell phone. Finally he
arrives in Elko, Nevada, the place that he ran away from years
ago and where his 80 year-old mother still lives.
Mom
takes him in, even if she hasn’t seen her only son for
more than thirty years. Although she’s only seen his face
on the covers of tabloids, and received nothing but a handful
of postcards from him, it’s as if he had only left for
a moment to buy a pack of cigarettes. She treats him as if he
were still a boy. Perhaps Mom realizes that Howard is on the
verge of a nervous breakdown. With her dry humor and matter-of-fact
approach to his failed career, she awakens Howard to his self-loathing
and self-pity.
Meanwhile,
the film shoot that Howard has abandoned is interrupted. The
insurance company is furious about the costly damage, which
increases daily. They hire a private detective, Sutter, to find
Howard. Sutter is a sort of bounty hunter. Like Howard, he is
a figure from a different world. In the following scenes, we
always see Sutter on Howard’s trail, in hot pursuit.
Howard,
an alcoholic, doesn’t stay sober for long at Mom’s
house. One night he wanders into the city and ends up in a crummy
casino, drinking with an old school buddy whose pitiful existence
mirrors his own life even more painfully. They get thoroughly
drunk, have a mindless fistfight, and end up in the gutter where
they get scooped up by the cops.
Howard
wakes up in a drying-out cell. This police incident brings Sutter
dangerously close to him, but Mom bails Howard out in the nick
of time. Afterward, they finally have a real conversation about
the past. Mom remembers that more than twenty years ago a young
woman called her up trying to locate Howard. Mom figured that
the girl was pregnant. Howard is shocked at the thought that
he has a grown child somewhere. This child seems to be a ray
of hope, a possible salvation from his narcissistic and meaningless
life. When Sutter appears in town, reminding Howard of the reality
he has escaped from, he flees again, this time to find his child
In
1900, Butte, Montana was the biggest city west of the Mississippi.
Now it is a place of deep depression. Downtown Butte is a ghost
town, barely recognizable as the setting of the film shot there
25 years ago, a movie that catapulted Howard to stardom. Many
affairs and one-night stands took place during that shoot. Doreen
was one of Howard’s flames then. She’s still working
at the same coffee shop where she met Howard as a young, blooming
beauty. She has a son, Earl, a rock musician and singer living
in Butte.
Howard
meets Doreen again. She reacts very calmly to the sudden reappearance
of her old lover and the father of her son. Howard’s meeting
with Earl, on the other hand, is quite violent. Earl completely
rejects this unknown father who appears too late in his life.
Saddened by this encounter, Howard is ready to give up and leave
Butte again, when out of nowhere a young woman named Sky appears.
She is exactly the same age as Earl. She is in fact, Howard’s
daughter, the product of another short fling that happened during
the filming of the same movie. She is Earl’s half-sister.
These siblings do not know about each other. That’s when
the real complications of this American family reunion begin...
For the first time in his life, Howard tries to do something
unselfish. He tries to put this disconnected family back together.
But he has little success. In the end, he is relieved when Sutter
appears to forcibly escort him back to his role on the movie
set. At least there he has written dialogue, a schedule, and
an order to keep that he is incapable of mastering in real life.
But even if his mission as a father is a failure, he has managed
to bring a brother and a sister together, and mother and her
son closer to each other...
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