Adventures of A Career Kid TRACK 29

By RICHARD CORLISS

What does a woman want? Something better than a man.

Anyway, Linda Henry (Theresa Russell) does. She looks around at models of the '80s American male and wonders what options are available. The four-wheel drivel of the macho man with emotional brutality stitched in his heart? No thanks, that species grew like kudzu in her small Southern town. How about the spinning wheels of the upscale drudge, playing with his toy trains and his whiny mistress? Nope, Linda's got one too many of those already: her husband, Dr. Henry Henry (Christopher Lloyd). His idea of smooth talk is bedtime baby talk.

No wonder that in her memories and fantasies, Linda pines for a figure of innocence, guile, power, vulnerability. Someone who understands and needs her. Something better than a man. A boy. A child. Her child. The child she conceived at 15 in a tussle with a fairground Casanova. The son she bore and, within two days, was forced to give up. If she can find him, 20 years later, perhaps she can reclaim the dreams of her youth and get a first grip on maturity. "Come soon," she whispers through the mirror to her onetime son and would-be lover. "Come today."

And into this abrasive parable of sexual frustration comes Martin (Gary Oldman), an Englishman who feels like an orphan, an alien in America -- the man who fell to earth, into a lonely woman's dream. She needs a son, so he'll be one, a cross between Dennis the Menace and Oedipus. He will play on her longing and guilt, in baby talk that moves her: "You never cuddled me, did you? . . . And you never let me follow your finger along the line of nice big $ words ((like)) 'Once upon a time.' " He will relive what was never his, "my American childhood," by tossing tantrums like a spoiled four-year-old. He will learn that the idyll of perpetual childhood is a peculiarly American dream: "Being a kid again is as good an occupation as any. In fact, it's a pretty good career!" He will caress Linda and bully her and play M-O-T-H-E-R on the living room piano. He will be anything she desires: her son, her seducer, her salvation, her fatal fantasy. Pity this child? No. Pity instead the careless mother -- what she missed, what she lost when she let him go.

Is Martin Linda's son? Does he even exist? Or has she created him out of her need for scenarios of lust and revenge? Those are just a few of the truth games played in this beguiling dark comedy by British Screenwriter Dennis Potter. As in his TV film The Singing Detective, Potter mixes memory and desire, threat and therapy, a misanthropic wit and the ache of nostalgia for old songs and sweeter dreams. Importing this brand of satire to rural America was a risk for Potter; some of his bleak irony must have been seized by Customs. But the ache of his characters is universal. And in Nicolas Roeg (Performance, Don't Look Now) he has secured a gifted director for whom reality has always been just one of the 57 varieties of imagination.

Don't expect to find subtle performances in this surreal treat. Russell, the criminally beautiful slut-goddess of art-house movies, becomes shrill in the upper registers of emotion. And Oldman is so acutely the rotten kid that you may want to stand him in the corner. These are not heroes to cherish: they are tiny figures on a Blue Velvet landscape, bleating out their obsessions. But in their cries is the music of recognizable people with their defenses down and their lurid nightmares ascendant. In Track 29 every woman is a flower demanding to open, and every man is a little boy lost.