Gem back on screen

Few movies capture West Texas like “Fandango” did with its yearning elegy to lost youth and its ode to the desert’s rough, dusty landscape.

Lucky for the film’s cultish fans, it again — for one night only — will be on a big screen Wednesday evening in San Elizario, just outside of El Paso, as part of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema’s annual Rolling Roadshow.

“Fandango” is a movie from the heart of a young director with a young cast spiked with soon-to-emerge stars and unknowns.

A quintessential coming-of-age film, is how director Kevin Reynolds described it in an e-mail from Iceland.

“I’m gratified that people … still ‘get it’ 20 years on,” Reynolds wrote.

In the 1985 film, five college buddies hop into a car in Austin on one last foolish act following graduation. It’s an adventure filled with lunacy and absurdities delivered by actors like Kevin Costner, Judd Nelson and Sam Robards.

The Roadshow organizers will kick off the event with a scavenger hunt to the film’s locations throughout West Texas, including Monahans, Pyote and Marfa.

The hunt begins in Austin, Roadshow founder Tim League said, and ends in San Elizario, the film’s final setting for a wedding.

“It’s something that adults can’t, won’t or don’t do anymore,” said League, who co-owns Alamo Drafthouse Cinema.

Although it barely made a dime at the box office, Fandango’s hardcore fans continue a love affair with the self-discovery movie.

“It touches that wild spark,” said Chuck Bush, who played Dorman, the laconic, 6-foot-8, beer-guzzling, soon-to-be minister.

And it’s a film that can be celebrated for its canny grasp of the Big Bend and desert landscapes.

“It’s vast, ugly, beautiful and magical,” San Antonio-born Reynolds wrote of West Texas. “… The movie would never have been the same without it. Central Texas just doesn’t have the power the West does.”

Texas is “wild” as Costner’s character, Gardner, said. “Always has been and always will be — just like us.”

So do something wild. Take off Wednesday. Drive west and enjoy a movie that commemorates untamed West Texas as much as it does lost youth.