We begin in a flat in London. We end on a train to nowhere somewhere in the south-west. In between times, a man half-heartedly investigates his brother's suicide, listens to some very good music, takes a detour with a nice German lady and has a lovely chat and a singsong with Sting. And all the time late '70s England looks as if it has one foot behind the Iron Curtain and another in a sci-fi dystopia.
Welcome to Radio On, Christopher Petit's contribution to that most American of film genres, the road movie. But rather than Route 66, Petit's interested in the M4 and instead of the fish-eyed lenses and camera flares of Easy Rider, his is a style that openly apes the great European filmmakers of the time. As such, Radio On is the most German-looking movie ever made in the UK by a British director.
That Petit's picture is often compared with continental classics like Wim Wenders' The American Friend and Kings Of The Road has more than one cause. For one thing, Wenders himself is Radio On's associate producer. For another, Wenders' assistant cameraman Martin Schafer serves as Petiti's DP. And yes, that is Lisa Kreuzer - late of The American Friend and Kings Of The Road - in the role of Ingrid.
Though Schafer, Kreuzer and even Wim Wenders weren't terribly well known in the UK in 1979, they were all hugely familiar to Chris Petit what with him being Time Out's film editor - this was back in the days when Time Out wasn't a free sheet but a comprehensive guide to what was going on in the world's greatest city, complete with film coverage that rivalled anything else then available in the UK.
Encountering Wenders while on assignment with the magazine, Petit convinced the great man to back his project - no mean feat given that Petit had yet to make a feature and there's little in his Radio On screenplay that screams commercial success.
The story, such as it is, centres around Londoner Robert (jobbing actor David Beames) who earns a crust spinning the discs on the United Biscuits radio network. Upon learning that his Bristol-based brother has taken his own life, Robert - after much dithering about - heads west to find out what caused his sibling to take such drastic action. During the journey, he encounters a variety of outsiders - an army deserter, an Eddie Cochran-obsessed petrol pump attendant, a German woman who’s lost custody of her child - each of whom occupies him far more than getting to the bottom of his brother's death. Eventually abandoning both his investigation and his vintage Rover, Robert boards a train and heads off into an uncertain future. You won't be surprised to learn that a Cannonball Run-style gag reel doesn't play over the end credits.
It's very much to Petit's credit that he's never tried to disguise Radio On's obtuseness. Upon presenting the movie at a festival the year after its release, the writer-director explained that while "[Radio On] is a film in black and white, it's not Manhattan. I'm also told that it's a film that divides its audience so I hope that at least a few of you are left [for the Q&A] at the end."
Of course, were it a more traditional picture, it's unlikely we'd be talking about Radio On with such reverence today. Likewise, were it not for the film's otherness, it mightn't have been such a hit with the midnight movie crowd at The Scala and the Screen On The Green.
With its impressively blank lead and its austere black-and-white cinematography, Radio On insists on so little that the viewer is free to interpret the events it depicts in pretty much any manner they choose. For this writer, it's that rare picture that travels backwards and forwards in time without resorting to either flashbacks or special effects. Take the petrol station that Sting attends to - it looks for all the world like the one Roald Dahl describes in the '50s-set Danny, The Champion Of The World.
The West Way, on the other hand, has seldom looked more like a runway for a vehicle that's still to be invented. And as our hero settles down for the night at Bristol's Grosvenor Hotel, the nearby flyover gives the impression that the cars are actually flying past his third floor window.
But while moments such as Robert having to use a hand-crank to start his car recall a very different age, certain incidents in Radio On tie it firmly to the late '70s . Take the Scottish squaddie - played with impressive intensity by Andrew Byatt - who has clearly left more than just his regiment in Northern Ireland. And then there's the soundtrack with its trio of Kraftwerk tracks, its brace of Bowie numbers and contemporary hits courtesy of Lena Lovich and the massive at the time Ian Dury.
Even here, though, all is not as it might sound. Giving his soundtrack the sort of billing usually reserved for a film's cast, Petit yet again whips back and forth through time. Whether it's Devo covering the Stones' 'Satisfaction' or Dury memorialising Gene Vincent, today and yesterday once more appear on an even footing; a state of play that reaches it peak when Robert and Sting's pump-boy perform a charming acoustic rendition of Eddie Cochran's 'Three Steps To Heaven'.
A quick word about Mr Sumner, while we're about it - he's very good in Radio On. No matter how badly he's stunk up the screen in pretty much everything else, he's positively delightful here - a rare blast of warmth in a wintery world dominated by concrete eye-sores and slate-grey skies. He also rounds out one of the film's most eccentric detours concerning Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran and the 1960 car crash that spirited the latter away shortly after the pair played the Bristol Hippodrome.
As for the journey proper, its conclusion, complete with Robert driving around a quarry in circles, brings to mind the penultimate image in another classic German art film, Werner Herzog's Strozek. That of course was the film Ian Curtis watched before he hanged himself. Is it a coincidence that Robert, what with his sharp haircut and gabardine raincoat, looks rather like the late Joy Division singer? Probably, but with Radio On, nothing is for certain.
Speaking of uncertainty, one wonders where Chris Petit thought Radio On might take him next. The answer was An Unsuitable Job For A Woman, a PD James adaptation which played at the 1982 Berlin Film Festival. Two years later he'd reunite with Lisa Kreuzer for the Wender-esque Flight To Berlin, before coaxing a great performance from Robbie Coltrane in Chinese Boxes, a thriller that seemed to have one eye on the mainstream but struggled to find any sort of an audience.
There've been other Pettit pictures and film projects since - a BBC Miss Marple mystery; a format-warping contribution to Channel 4's Without Walls strand; his Radio On Remix which is available on the new BFI Blu-ray - culminating in 2002's London Orbital, a pseudo documentary by Britain's most-celebrated (sole?) director of road movies about the country's most infamous motorway, the M25.
Petit's also the author of several novels, the most recent being The Butchers Of Berlin, a police procedural only with the cops replaced by the SS. It was published to considerable acclaim in 2016.
And yet still it's Radio On people return to. Whether it's the graffiti calling for justice for Baader-Meinhofette Astrid Prol or the sight of a Rover on a cliff-edge its doors wide open all the better to allow the world to enjoy Kraftwerk's 'Ohm Sweet Ohm', there are sounds and images here that live on in the subconscious mind like the most vivid of dreams, the most troubling of nightmares. And while dislocation is among the themes running through Petit's film, there's a generation of people for whom a few bars of the German version of 'Heroes' or the insistent pulse of Kraftwerk's 'Radioactivity' are all they need to find themselves returned to the West Way.
A final point worth making - for all that is serious and troubling about Radio On, it'd be wrong to think out it as a film completely free of humour. Take the scene where, as Robert leafs through her German-English-German phrasebook, Lisa Kreuzer's Ingrid says, "Last night I thought we would sleep together, but we won't."
"How do you say that in German?" Robert tersely replies.