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Criterion Spine #654 · Episode 6
Repo Man
Alex Cox, 1984 · with James Chestnut
"Otto is Forrest Gump."
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Otto is a punk kid with no job and no direction. He falls in with a crew of repo men who repossess cars from people who can't make their payments — and finds himself drawn into a hunt for a 1964 Chevrolet Malibu whose trunk contains something no one will describe. Alex Cox's debut is a caustic, funny, thoroughly punk dispatch from the margins of Reagan's America, shot with the verve and economy of someone with nothing to lose.
James Chestnut is an assistant director whose path into the film industry started at Penn State University and led him to the set of Tony Scott's high-speed thriller Unstoppable (2010) — an experience that set his career in motion. Since then, he's built a career working behind the scenes on numerous HBO productions, helping bring prestige television to life from the inside. A lifelong cinephile with a soft spot for cult and genre filmmaking, James joins us to dig into Alex Cox's punked-out debut — a film that turned a $1.5 million budget into one of the most singular cult classics in the Criterion Collection.
Spoiler-free context and starting points.