Alex Cox is the kind of film-maker who makes critics uncomfortable because he refuses to fail quietly. Repo Man (1984) arrived as a punk hand grenade thrown at Reagan's America — cheap, fast, genuinely weird, and absolutely sure of itself. Sid and Nancy followed, with Gary Oldman delivering a performance so committed it still unsettles. Then Cox did something most directors don't survive: he made Walker, a barbed political western set in Nicaragua with Ed Harris, and Hollywood walked away from him. He didn't seem to mind. What came next is the part most retrospectives skim. From 1988 to 1994, Cox presented BBC Two's Moviedrome, programming cult and neglected films for a generation of British cinephiles who had no other access to them. This was curation as political act — the same instinct that drove his film-making, now applied to the archive. He was doing algorithmic-recommendation-hostile film culture before the algorithm existed. He decamped to Mexico in the 1990s and made Highway Patrolman, arguably his most formally controlled film — a slow-burn moral portrait that bears no resemblance to the punk energy of his debut, and is better for it. Then Liverpool for Three Businessmen. Then back to the States for Searchers 2.0 and Repo Chick and Bill the Galactic Hero. The filmography is scattered and wilfully uneven, which is exactly what you'd expect from someone who treats the film industry as an obstacle rather than a habitat. Dead Souls, billed as his final film, adapts Nikolai Gogol's 1842 novel — itself one of literature's great unfinished things — as a darkly comic western. Cox also stars, playing Strindler (or is it Swindler?), a drifter buying the names of dead Mexican labourers and getting progressively tangled in his own mythology. Edward Tudor-Pole co-stars, which is either inspired or deeply strange casting, depending on your tolerance for Cox's sense of humour. Probably both. The Gogol source material is a gift: a picaresque about fraud and identity in a dying empire translates to the American West with almost no adjustment needed. The Q&A tour starting 4 November — Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, London, Oxford — is the right format for a swansong. Cox has always been better encountered in person than mediated through critical consensus, which has never quite known what category to file him under. The published screenplay alongside Gogol's original novel is a smart pairing: it invites the reader to watch Cox argue with his source, which is where his best work lives. Whether Dead Souls is actually his last film or just the latest in a series of provisional endings, the question worth putting to him is the one his whole career poses: what does independence actually cost, and was it worth it?
