Wild at Heart maps the flight of Sailor (Nicholas Cage) and his beloved Lula (Laura Dern) from the violent minions of Lula’s mad-as-a-hatter mother (Dern’s real life mother, Diane Ladd) who has vowed to keep them apart. If that synopsis sounds fairly straightforward, be assured that Lynch compensates for this seeming regularity elsewhere. Besides a kind of framing device that links the film at key moments to The Wizard of Oz.
      Wild at Heart boasts a cast of characters and scenes of violence that compete well against any screen weirdness ever presented anywhere. Most of the movie is a road trip, with Sailor and Lula running away from her mother, the psychotic Marietta Fortune (played by Dern's real-life mother, Diane Ladd), who sucks martinis and smears lipstick all over her face, which tends to clash with her orange nail polish. Marietta hates Sailor, thinking he knows something about a secret she's kept buried for many years. So she sends the naive detective who loves her (Harry Dean Stanton) out to find them, then also sends a hit man who wants to kill Sailor and the detective. As they travel, "Sail" and "Peanut," as they call each other, encounter all kinds of weirdos, culminating with a band of goons in Bad Tuna, Texas.