True Stories (Blu-ray with CD Soundtrack)

David Byrne’s exuberant musical road trip through Texas, in a Blu-ray edition featuring the complete soundtrack on CD.

Music icon David Byrne was inspired by tabloid headlines to make this sole foray into feature film directing, an ode to the extraordinariness of ordinary American life and a distillation of what was in his own idiosyncratic mind.

Byrne plays a visitor to Virgil, Texas, who introduces us to the citizens of the town during preparations for its Celebration of Specialness. As shot by cinematographer Ed Lachman, Texas becomes a hyper-realistic late-capitalist landscape of endless vistas, shopping malls, and prefab metal buildings.

In True Stories, Byrne uses his songs to stitch together pop iconography, voodoo rituals, and a singular variety show—all in the service of uncovering the rich mysteries that lurk under the surface of everyday experience.

• New, restored 4K digital transfer, supervised by director David Byrne and cinematographer Ed Lachman, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack,supervised by Byrne
• New documentary about the film’s production, featuring members of the cast and crew
• CD with 23 songs, containing the film’s complete soundtrack, compiled here for the first time
• Real Life (1986), a short documentary by Pamela Yates and Newton Thomas Sigel made on the set of the film
• No Time to Look Back, a new homage to Virgil, Texas, the fictional town where True Stories is set
• New programme about designer Tibor Kalman and his influence on Byrne and role in the film, featuring Byrne and Kalman’s wife, artist Maira Kalman
• Deleted scenes
• Trailer
• PLUS: An essay by critic Rebecca Bengal, along with new pieces by journalist and author Joe Nick Patoski and Byrne, a 1986 piece by actor Spalding Gray on the film’s production, some of the tabloid stories that inspired the film, and a selection of Byrne’s pre-production photography and writing about the film’s visual motifs