04-20-2012

There are certainly worse ways to spend an evening than driving around with Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton in this 1984 punk comedy. Not yet a member of The Breakfast Club, Estevez is suitably blank as the L.A. teen who stumbles into the auto repossession trade, and Stanton is suitably sage as the geezer who mentors him. Englishman Alex Cox made a big impression with this shaggy satire of La-La Land losers; unfortunately, his cantankerous career really tailed off after Sid and Nancy. Despite the film’s famous tagline in Stanton’s gutter-existentialist monologue (“…ordinary fucking people, I hate ’em”), Repo Man is actually quite warm in its view of humanity. That affectionate spirit is embodied, of course, by Tracey Walter’s gentle, alien-seeking soul, who alone can drive that fateful 1964 Chevy Malibu. Then there’s the soundtrack: Iggy Pop, Black Flag, Suicidal Tendencies, the Circle Jerks, and those great pioneers of punk, The Andrews Sisters. (R) BRIAN MILLER

Tue., April 24, 7 p.m., 2012