True Depths

In writing the screenplay for his directorial debut, Badlands, the filmmaker Terrence Malick took inspiration from the real-life killing spree of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, which shocked the United States in early 1958. But Malick also took liberties. Rather than unfolding in Nebraska and Wyoming, where the actual crimes occurred, the 1973 neo-noir film is set in the Dakotas, Montana, and Saskatchewan. The fictional Kit Carruthers, played by Martin Sheen, is twenty-five; Starkweather was only nineteen when he terrorized Middle America. Similarly, Holly Sargis, played by Sissy Spacek, is a year older than fourteen-year-old Fugate, who may or may not have been in love and a willing participant in the carnage.

Malick changed many other biographical details for his protagonists and their victims and told their story in a way that diverged from the historical record as often as it paralleled it, but Badlands is the better for it — an...