cmndrnineveh This film is perhaps the ONLY film to "document" what life was probably like for the vast majority of young people in working class America in the late seventies and early eighties, when a true sense of bizarreness reigned in big cities all across the country. This was the world that David Bowie, Kiss, disco and cocaine had made for everyone who had to "get out of the house at night". It was also a statement about how rough life was for anybody trying to make their way in the world during that period, where inflation was rampant and jobs were VERY difficult to come by.This situation leads one of the characters, Koop, played by Keith Carradine, to join forces with a paranoid but educated and shady black guy by the name of Solo in a diner owned by Genevieve Bujold's character, Wanda. Also frequenting the diner, which he also lives over, is ex-cop Hawk, newly released from prison, played by Kris Kristofferson. The two clash, as Koop descends into a life of crime with Solo, trying to feed his wife and baby while Hawk develops an eye for his young wife, played by Lori Singer.The mood of this movie has many parts: equal parts weird, compassionate, exposition, self-consciously fashionable, and stylish. It captures the zeitgeist of the period between 1975 and 1982 perfectly...the desperation of young people, especially POOR young people, to get a taste of the glitzy good life and to simply survive in a world that it is too easy to realize really IS cold and cruel! Alan Rudolph's art director should have won an Oscar for his work on this film, as it captures the presumed time it was set in perfectly. Rudolph himself deserves kudos too, for giving the world a chronicle of the weird world of new wave-disco era, big city America. Bujold, Carradine, Morton, Singer and even Kristofferson are good in it as well.This is the middle one of three great movies Rudolph produced in the mid-to-late eighties that he and his repertoire company, (usually just Bujold and Carradine,) can be justifiably proud. These are "Choose Me", "The Moderns" and this one. "The Moderns" must be seen to be believed. As good as the mood setting is in "TiM", "The Moderns" walks all over it.Enjoy.

roganmarshall "Trouble in Mind" is one of those movies that only reveals its greatness about the third time you see it; a wealth of details which, on first viewing, strike the perceptive viewer as scatterbrained or irrelevant, unfold on closer inspection into a rich, lushly imagined fantasy world, and dialogue which at first sounds precious or forced becomes endlessly quotable. It's hard to be an Alan Rudolph "fan," as his work is decidedly uneven; but on this picture, which followed the critical and commercial success of "Choose Me," he is at the peak of his powers. And, if none of this convinces you, you should check this one out for the performances, not least among which is Divine's startling turn as coldblooded (male) gangster Hilly Blue (worthy of awards, in a better world than this).

Brian W. Fairbanks Ever since I saw "Choose Me" at the Cedar-Lee theatre in Cleveland, Ohio in 1985, I have reminded myself to hunt down other films directed by Alan Rudolph. I can't say much positive about "Trouble in Mind," though.Two veterans of "Choose Me," Keith Carradine and Genevieve Bujold, are on hand, but so is Kris Kristofferson, the singer, songwriter, and actor whose singing, songwriting, and acting are usually done in a coma. Instead of the soulful tunes of Teddy Pendergrass (a real highlight of the earlier film), the soundtrack is wasted on the rough (and wasted) voice of Marianne Faithful, whose dreary vocals grate on the nerves. Director (and writer) Rudolph may have a story to tell, but it's so weak and undefined that it gets lost beside the bizarre characters and the even more bizarre hairstyles worn by Carradine.Aside from Carradine's loony portrayal, the only purpose served by "Trouble in Mind" is to provide the cross-dressing Divine with a role in which he dresses in clothes more suitable to his gender. But then again, I tend to suspect that this is one of those movies that will look a lot better on its second or third viewing than it does on its first. I won't write this one off just yet.

Scott-8 "Trouble in Mind" is a moody and decidedly different film. Take your pick as to whether it's set in an alternate reality or a retro-future. Either way, the inhabitants of Rain City are drifters and lost people whose lives collide as they go on to whatever fate awaits them. Divine makes a surprisingly good bad guy, while Kristofferson is a little wooden but still fits the part. Worth seeing.