After Blue Velvet, David Lynch had his greatest success to date in a different medium: television. His show Twin Peaks, a quirky mystery series, became an unlikely hit.

Riding high on that triumph, he chose as his next film as adaptation of a crime novel by Barry Gifford. Lynch was initially asked to produce the film for his friend Monty Montgomery to direct, but once he read the material he claimed it for himself.

The result, Wild at Heart, is a violent, erotic, sometimes goofily earnest thrill ride — a Wizard of Oz homage that Lynch described as “a picture about finding love in Hell.”

Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern play Sailor and Lula, a star-crossed couple who are equal parts Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. They embark on a road trip from North Carolina to California when Sailor is released on parole after being jailed for manslaughter.

The man Sailor slaughtered was trying to kill him on behalf of Lula’s mother, Marietta, played with gusto by Dern’s real-life mom, Diane Ladd (who earned an Oscar nomination for her performance).

Wild at Heart is very sexy and very violent, and had to dial both of those attributes down to avoid an X rating. It’s telling that the film doesn’t seem all that extreme by today’s standards, though it still packs a punch.

The two most effective scenes aren’t graphic but are quite disturbing in that distinctly Lynchian way. In one, a skeevy criminal named Bobby Peru (played by a never-creepier Willem Dafoe) tries to seduce a frightened Lula in a motel room. In another, Sailor and Lula come across a deadly car crash on the side of a deserted road, where they find an injured woman (Sherilyn Fenn) traumatized by a brain injury.

Those encounters shake the couple out of their giddy outlaw romance and bring them crashing back to the real world.

While the novel concludes on a sad note, Lynch felt his characters deserved a happy ending — complete with a visit from The Wizard of Oz‘s Glinda the Good Witch and a Cage-crooned rendition of ‘Love Me Tender.’

Wild at Heart was divisive for critics and audiences alike. It won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival but also earned Lynch some of his worst reviews. It earned $15 million at the U.S. box office, $5 million more than its budget. As with all of Lynch’s films, it has been embraced as a cult classic in the years that followed.

Lynch’s films often serve up indelible moments, and one for me in this movie is a late-night conversation between Sailor and Lula shot through the front windshield of their car as they drive down a desolate highway. The long scene is scored to an instrumental version of Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Game,’ and it’s so deliriously seductive and dreamy that I wanted it to last forever.