HOLLYWOOD — In a way, Nicolas Cage has become crown prince of the movies' darker realms of absurdity. Think of his wildly contrasting roles: the gawky Bobby Rydell cartoon in Peggy Sue Got Married, the demented Manhattan bloodsucker in Vampire's Kiss, the bad-vibes gangster in Cotton Club.
With these performances and others, Cage has become the odd man out among young American leading men. He's the neo-expressionist screwballer, the spooky-ride king. In Wild at Heart (opening today in Central Florida), he hits a career watershed - playing Bogey-man to a whole Casablanca of oddball actors: Laura Dern, Diane Ladd, Harry Dean Stanton, Crispin Glover, Willem Dafoe and all the others, a rogue's gallery of bent denizens of the road, assembled under the direction of that master of lyrical, childlike horror, David Lynch.
''David is like a criminal director,'' Cage says with admiration. ''He's not concerned with Establishment laws and rules. He just does what he does - and it's honest. . . . He's constantly sculpting and fishing. A scene can turn into a comedy or into heavy horror in a fraction of a second. He's very much a sculptor, a spontaneous sculptor.
''When you talk about various levels in acting . . . the same is true with David in Wild at Heart. It's a very universal film, operating on different levels. It operates on a comedic level. It operates on a real level. And also on that absurdist level. Like, there's this gritty road movie, this gritty love story on the road, emanating through a Wizard of Oz tonality - which gives it more texture and color.''
Atop the movie's amazingly eccentric ensemble, Cage's Sailor Ripley becomes the latest in his string of double-jointed performances. As a free spirit, trapped in another man's image - in this case, Elvis Presley's - Cage displays the lizard-lidded '50s cool of a rock rebel, murmuring lines in a smoky pastiche of Elvis' macho purr. (''Wild at Heart is the kind of movie I wish Elvis would have done,'' he says.)
This isn't just an impersonation - like Kurt Russell's John Wayne in Big Trouble in Little China or Christian Slater's Jack Nicholson in Heathers. It's a multilayered turn with coatings of parody, pop tribute and in-joke. And it may signal Cage's emergence as the ace - or, at the very least, joker - of his acting generation.
Cage, of course, is Francis Coppola's nephew, and, at first, there may have been a feeling that Coppola's virtuosity and success had unlocked a Pandora's box of other Coppolas, including Francis' father, Carmine Coppola; sister Talia Shire; and daughter Sofia Coppola. That, actually, is why Nicolas Coppola, at 17, became Nicolas Cage. He says he didn't want the distraction, at auditions, of being a Coppola, of queries and small talk. So he took his stage name from a couple of offbeat Cages: comic-book hero Luke and avant-garde composer John.
Then, after working for his uncle twice - in Rumble Fish (1983) and Cotton Club (1984) - Cage made a breakthrough, under Coppola's direction again, in Peggy Sue Got Married. There has been something nutty about Cage's roles ever since: the hapless convenience-store thief in Raising Arizona, wild man Ronnie Cammareri in Moonstruck, the yuppie would-be vampire of Vampire's Kiss.
All these performances, on one level, are jokes. But they're serious jokes. There's real pain and anguish and a sense of life's evil forces behind them. Cage, who showed as early as Valley Girl (1983) and Birdy (1985) that he could do primal-man roles with the best of them, has, in the past four years, refined his style. He has sweetened it, opened it out, shown he can suggest the many opposing forces (good-evil, dark-light, hot-cold) that can beat within a single wild breast.
He may be the most playful and goofily inventive of the movies' young American leading men right now. He doesn't have Robin Williams' hot-wire free-association wizardry, Sean Penn's manic intensity, Michael Keaton's razzle-dazzle spontaneity or Denzel Washington's buttery cool. But, in some ways, he comes up with more startling choices than any of them.
''I don't really know what it is that I do as an actor,'' he says. ''I get an image or an idea - and I crystallize it, try to imitate it, make it come to life. Get a visual image first.''
Cage's characters often suggest the swoony survivors of a generation besotted by media: the kids whose body style and ideas were set not by their parents or community but by TV, movies, radio, rock 'n' roll. He often patterns his performances on images he has culled out of culture, high and low. In Wild at Heart, it's Elvis. In Peggy Sue Got Married, he used the voice of a Claymation horse on The Gumby Show. In Moonstruck, wild Ronnie is slightly based on the beast of Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast.
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