"In 1959 a lot of people were killing time. Kit and Holly were killing people."

It's a tag line for the ages, precisely summing up the plot, purpose and spectacle of Terrence Malick's Badlands in two easy sentences. There's a temporal location, an existential condition, at least two characters and a sense of ironic dissonance towards their unusual activities. Exactly these same traits enliven the described 95-minute film that exists for its slightly cultish audience as a masterpiece of '70s cinema.

Inspired by the Charles Starkweather and Caril-Ann Fugate murders of 1958, Malick wrote, produced and directed his aesthetically rigorous debut feature film. It begins in Fort Dupree, South Dakota and ends in the dread badlands of Montana on the way to the Canadian border. Along the way Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen), a 25-year old garbage man with an unusual moral compass, meets and captivates 15-year old Holly Sargis, a high school student with an extraordinary attitude towards her small town isolation.

Simultaneously the lone charge of her widowed father (Warren Oates) and the apple of Kit's agitated eye, she's a well-spoken observer of life without seeming to feel any affect concerning her own crazed experience. She's emotionally withdrawn, contented to be the object of her lover's homicidal loyalty, remaining strangely dispassionate towards the cruelty to which she becomes party.

In fact, it's her complicity with Kit's crimes that make her a cipher for exploring his boredom and outrage over the limitations of a slow-moving world. Yet it's this very same complicity without direct, bloody participation that makes her attraction to Kit an interesting way of indicting innocence, guilt and ethical judgment as an underlying theme of the film.

Kicking off this indictment, Kit befriends Holly and attempts to do the right thing after her father severely curtails her free time in light of their May-December romance. Requesting permission to court the teenager, Kit is told in no uncertain terms to stop coming around. Ever the acolyte of deeply personal purposes, he nods goodbye to conventional romance and arrives at the Sargis house with a handgun, intending to take what he considers rightfully his. When Holly's father discovers him, the two men collide, leaving one dead daddy under the getaway ruse of a fiery suicide pact.

Forced to live on the run, Kit and Holly drive cross-country, enjoying their most pleasant respite in the woods where they construct an idyllic tree house. Kit hunts for food, thatches the walls of their home and watches for invaders of their newly formed domestic calm. Meanwhile Holly continues her studies of high school textbooks, performs household chores and largely remains the object of Kit's unending, obsessional love.

Eventually their presence is discovered. Bounty hunters descend on them only to be dispatched by Kit before he and Holly hit the road again in a stolen vehicle looking for their salvation, eventually hitting on the idea of escaping into Canada.

They stop at a rich man's mansion, eat his food, hold him hostage in a spare bedroom and steal his car. They visit Kit's friend Cato (Ramon Bieri), enjoy his hospitality but ultimately shoot him along with two passersby. Then their trek slides into its apocalyptic phase as Kit's increasingly trigger happy solution to everything puts them in harms way until they are eventually apprehended. Significantly, their romp across the Midwest ends only when Holly refuses to keep up with their life on the run.

Kit ends up quite popular in the law and order circle of his pursuers who learn to like him despite his having committed numerous murders. Charming and honest to the end, he accepts the full mantle of responsibility for his bloody adventures and is summarily executed even as Holly goes on to marry the son of his prosecuting attorney, or so we're told in her final voice-over scored to a memorable theme by Carl Orff.

Sketched more leanly, Badlands is about a boy, a girl and his violent attempts to earn her love only to secure his destruction and her ambivalent delivery into mainstream life. The by-now rote symbols of mangled innocence and misfired rebellion are present throughout from the movie's opening frames of Kit picking up trash all the way through to the airplane ride delivering them to their ultimate doom. For him, of course, this doomsday is literal. For her, however, the conclusion is more ambivalent when considering the film's acceptance of exploitive elements seemingly implicit in violent road movies, though nowhere embraced in this calculated send-up of youth-gone-bad conventions.

Partially the result of a carefully stripped down script rich with voice-over explanations, musings and observations by Holly Sargis, the real innovation of Badlands is its simplicity. But it's also partially the result of Sheen and Spacek performing star turns as two young people who are totally out of synch with their times and who find themselves unbridled by the pattern of everyday life.

Having killed her father, Kit additionally assumes the handle of paternity as his right according to the typical Oedipal trajectory. Likewise Holly becomes a castrating mother as she withholds her affection and, ultimately, rejects Kit at his greatest moment of truth. So this idea of assuming what it is they destroy throughout their adventures only to see this destruction turn on them is important when considering Malick's moral universe.

For instance, it's no small thing to purposefully act of independence with a unique point-of-view. But it's equally important, as Kit tells us in one of the film's all-but-direct address sequences when he records his motives and philosophy into a Dictaphone, that the status quo should be accepted when it's fully embraced, even with oddballs like himself. Though his meaning is opaque, his actions bear out what he means in light of how he acts out in order to discover the boundaries and limitations of his new freedom, and then accepts the turn of events resulting in his capture, incarceration and execution with characteristic humor. Like a boy growing into the preferred social mold, Kit Carruthers journeys to manhood but unlike the typical boy he fails to learn the rules of the game fast enough to live among his peers with some measure of kindness and safety.

Separately Holly learns the privileges of womanhood by uncovering the slavish devotion of men to their sense of tolerance and freedom. Once threatened with becoming truly original, if not truly an outlaw, she abhors the potential burden of Canada as the symbol of escape from everything she knows. Where Kit anticipated and journeyed towards this ever elusive idea of true liberation, she is tantalized by the notion, indeed captivated by it as an idea, but ultimately unable to step beyond the abstract and apply it to the rule of her fundamentally small town life. Thus she becomes a threatening, restrictive mother to Kit's truant boy and in so doing she survives him only to become a traditional wife.

Beyond these interpretations of motive, context, meaning and purpose, though, it's virtually inarguable that Badlands is a stunning visual feast. With its cinematography performed by Tak Fujimoto, Stevan Larner and Brian Probyn, the look of the finished film is of a photorealist canvas set in motion. Landscapes are reproduced with painterly composition. The richness of plains colors and the size of empty spaces between burps of civilization provide this world within our world the suggestion of not just another time and place but of a parallel world with a greater deference to the face of awesome natural power. It's a technical filmmaker's clinic on the art of using light to frame a kind of reality and is, luckily, available on videotape in its original aspect ratio.

At least some of this appeal was recognized in the National Film Preservation Board that saw fit to add Malick's film into the National Film Registry in 1993. It was a 20th year anniversary gift and maybe even a mild corrective to the actions of the film community during its year of release.

Remembering how 1973 was the triumph of Paul Newman and Robert Redford's Academy Award-winning buddy film The Sting, it's a jolt to set Badlands alongside this utterly innocuous historical comedy for comparison. Not to say Malick's work should have been named movie of the year. It's just that more challenging, independently minded films are often overlooked in the annual trough of critical salutes that is the Oscars.

In light of Malick's subsequent films, Days of Heaven in 1978 and The Thin Red Line in 1998, it may also be enough to say his pictures are beautiful, though few in number. Then there's Martin Sheen whose movie career has experienced numerous highs and lows in the last 30 years, only to find one of its brightest moments on the TV series The West Wing. And there's Sissy Spacek whose body of work testifies to the appeal of an intense red head with a large number of great films under her belt, many of which have been elevated above the typical pap of the multiplex through her involvement.

Finally, the historical value of watching Sheen and Spacek in Malick's debut is extreme. Youth, excitement and vigor are there's to command along with the nostalgic, rear view mirror glance of the film's setting in 1959 that's just like our own view of Badlands. That is, Kit and Holly experience another moment in time running in parallel to the way we watch their occupation of history so we might know the archival magic of movies.