Johnny Suede is a 1991 American film, the directorial debut of Tom DiCillo, and stars Brad Pitt and Catherine Keener in some of their earliest roles, along with Calvin Levels and Nick Cave.

[3] Johnny Suede is a young man with an attitude and an immense pompadour, who aspires to be a rock n' roll star like his idol Ricky Nelson.

[4] Spinning personal experiences into monologues, he created a character whose vulnerability is obscured by a superficial fifties era cool, exaggerated to the point of foolishness.

[6] Additional funding came from the National Endowment for the Arts for twenty-five thousand dollars, as well as a Panavision package and help with the script from the Sundance Lab.

By August 1989, having not found what they were looking for in New York, DiCillo and his casting director, Marcia Shulman, went to Los Angeles, where Brad Pitt was the second to last guy seen.

In fact he only had two things; he’d done a small Canadian TV series and he’d just finished shooting what he’d listed as his only real film credit — something called Thelma and Louise that no one had heard about because it hadn’t even been edited yet.