Repo Man Will Repossess the Hearts of Dallasites With Help From the Circle Jerks

What’s most astonishing about a rewatch of the 1984 black comedy Repo Man is how contemporary it feels. In many ways, the story of a young punk (Emilio Estevez) and his world-weary car repossession mentor (Harry Dean Stanton) could have been shot today.

The movie’s nihilistic attitudes and snarky aphorisms (“Ordinary fucking people…I hate ‘em”) may capture the Ronald Reagan era anti-consumerism and distrust of institutions, yet Repo Man is still perfectly in tune with what’s going on in 2026. This was a surprise to its writer-director, Alex Cox. 

“It’s kind of weird that things haven’t really moved forward very much since the 1970s,” the 71-year-old Cox tells the Observer. “We’ve been in an aggressive grind. It’s very annoying, but one can hope some change will come and maybe music will have something to do with it.”  

Cox immersed himself in the spiky sounds of punk from the very beginning of his career. While making the rounds at live music clubs, he was roped in by a neighbor to repossess cars. For $25 a pop, he was tasked with parking cars “somewhere the assholes wouldn’t be able to find [them]. We were always imagining the victims as assholes, even now, years later,” he says.

This, plus a friend’s “profound intonations” about society, led to the genesis of Repo Man, which made its way through multiple studios. Eventually, Michael Nesmith of Monkees fame, and former Dallasite, got Universal Studios to back the film, ultimately casting a pre-Breakfast Club Estevez and Stanton. Cox also roped in the who’s who of Los Angeles musicians at the time for the Repo soundtrack (Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Iggy Pop), a move he credits for the film’s enduring appeal. 

“What I originally wanted to do is make a film about the neutron bomb and nuclear war, but no one was interested in that, so I thought I’d make a film about repo men and the neutron bomb,” he says. “In the late 1980s, every film had to be about high school students, so I said it’s going to be about a punk rock high school student who dodges work from a repo company and finds a neutron bomb. That was the genesis, and it started to include all these social aspects of that time. The punk soundtrack is why it’s entered cult status because it’s such a great collage of the time.” 

Cox is bringing those vibes (and some of those tunes) to a mini concert and screening tour with the Circle Jerks at the Texas Theatre (231 W Jefferson Blvd.) on May 1. He says he hopes the event will prompt future shows on the West Coast. It’s a long-awaited renaissance for a filmmaker who was almost entirely blacklisted by the major film studio system for years.

Despite Repo Man landing in the coveted Criterion Collection, a distribution company focused on licensing important contemporary cinematic works, Cox was kicked off the Hollywood fast track by the mixed reception of his 1987’s Walker — a fate he accepts with zero regrets. 

Still, Cox never stopped working. While his subsequent films didn’t reach the heights of earlier works, he continued releasing movies every few years — most recently a Western (his favorite genre) based on the Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, funded by Kickstarter. Taking a DIY approach has allowed Cox the freedom to create on his own terms, and he hopes these recent screenings will pave the way for a long-awaited sequel to Repo Man.

“The Wages of Beer is the Repo Man sequel taking place 40 years from when our hero vanished into the universe,” Cox says. “He’s only aged 90 minutes, but he’s had a lifetime of weird experiences and finds himself in a new set of weird experiences. It has some of the actors from the original film, some new actors and some puppets… We could do it this year or shoot in 2027.” 

In the meantime, the director hopes his first cult classic will capture the attention of a Gen Z audience, who, coincidentally, are just as disaffected as their Gen X progenitors.  

“Their parents have seen Repo Man, so there is a possibility it’ll drift down through the generations by a parent pulling out a VCR and fixing the remote control in a quaking hand,” he says. “The film did endure and represent a generational thing. It’s a great rock and roll story.” 

At the Helm presents The Circle Jerks for a special live performance, followed by a screening of Alex Cox’s Repo Man, at 8 p.m. on May 1 at the Texas Theatre. Tickets are $43.