Critic Reviews

True Stories is David Byrne's funny, worried, loving celebration of a disoriented America. [27 Oct 1986, p.103]

Even the ordinary moments in True Stories seem a little odd, as if the actors are trying to humor the weirdo they're working for.

Joyous, daft and hauntingly original, True Stories is Byrne's magical mystery tour of Texas: an introduction to the imaginary town of Virgil and its faintly surreal folks.

True Stories is an Our Town for our time, a slightly surreal portrait of the fictional frontier village of Virgil, Texas, sprung from a pancake landscape and hogtied with freeways.

It doesn't ask much of anything except that you come along for the ride. Riding with Byrne is pretty much a hoot. [09 Nov 1986, p.K1]

True Stories may well appeal more to those who don't know much about Mr. Byrne's music career than those who do. The soundtrack songs have the catchy simplicity of Talking Heads' most recent and least demanding compositions. And the film's imagery, expertly captured in bold, bright colors by Ed Lachman, will be even more striking to those who find it novel.

Byrne is a major musical artist, as he was shown to be in his rock concert film Stop Making Sense, but as a filmmaker he has barely stretched his muscles. [31 Oct 1986, p.A]

Byrne is trying for something large scale: a postmodern Nashville. Byrne sets up the material for satirical sequences, yet he doesn't give it a subversive spin. His unacknowledged satire is like a souffle that was never meant to rise.

True Stories is a great-looking and, with Byrne's score, great-sounding film, but it's marked by a flaw of sensibility, a too-great division between the one who is looking and the ones who are being seen. [31 Oct 1986, p.A]

True Stories is united not by narrative, but by Byrne's sensibility, and this is where it descends from being a boring piece of whimsy into something reprehensible.