The coming-of-age rite with a distinct literary flavor: Richard Ford has pieced together the screenplay from a couple of his own short stories, and the resulting creation has an unorganic quality, a lurching, Frankenstein's-monster quality. Lili Taylor, as a young woman of dubious character who is on a mission to spring her brother from the Casper, Wyo., jail, delivers her lines with a great deal of eccentricity (enough to call to mind Susan Tyrrell). And Bill Pullman has one big scene as a spaced-out sleazeball. The violence perhaps breaks through the surface a little too readily, a little too demonstratively, but at least two sequences take the time to build up a deep sense of premonitory dread. Dermot Mulroney, Sam Shepard, Mary Kay Place, Kevin Tighe; directed by Michael Fields. (1991) — Duncan Shepherd