Alan Rudolph’s Trouble in Mind exists in a beautifully stylised pocket universe – a self-contained world made from the ground up pulp of comics printed in 1948.
The visual language comes straight from Jack Cole and Will Eisner, right down to the poster art. It sells it as graphic noir surrealism: stark angles, high-contrast lighting, a bird’s-eye view of a city that doesn’t obey time or space. The movie itself is a pastiche of material you’d expect to find in the margins between the panels of post-war crime funnies.
Every performance is pitched in that zone between pulp and pantomime. Kristofferson plays Hawk like a man who’s already lost the only fight that mattered. Lori Singer and Keith Carradine are a couple on the run with a baby and no plan, the sort of hard luck woeful characters that could only be written in the purgatory of a smoky naugahyde booth at a late-night diner. And Divine dons a suit and tie as the gangster Hilly Blue, just another exaggerated silhouette that would feel at home in Gotham city.
Director Alan Rudolph was deep in his groove here – melancholy noir, thick with chiaroscuro and oddball cool, a dream where everyone speaks fluent pulp. He doesnt go for any type of naturalism, he just plasters mood on top of mood until it peels off the walls.
Trouble In Mind hid in plain sight on video store shelves, it looked like a postcard from a reality that exists right next door to ours. You wouldn’t want to live there, but it’s a swell place to visit… providing it lets you leave. Even 40 years later, part of me still haunts the streets of Rain City.