Terrence Malick’s thriller Badlands (1973), is rightly revered as one of the most astonishing debuts in cinema. Its reissue is a wonderful chance to discover why. The drama feels so slight that it’s barely there. Yet the film – inspired by a sensational case about a young couple who went on a killing spree in Nebraska and Wyoming – is exquisitely shifty. Nothing quite fits.

Malick latched on to the newspaper facts like Truman Capote. The real-life murders were committed by a 19–year-old called Charles Starkweather, who butchered the family of his underage girlfriend, Caril Fugate, in 1958. He was executed in 1959, while she was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Malick’s stroke of genius was to reprise the story with the 25-year-old Martin Sheen at his playful and intense best, and 22-year-old Sissy Spacek as his freckly 15-year-old lover. The innocuous way they hook up sets up this deceptively low-key road movie. Badlands begins in a tiny town in South Dakota in the 1950s where the most exotic thing for square miles is Sheen’s carefully combed quiff. With his loud cowboy boots and tight jeans, Sheen’s garbage collector is the proud spitting image of James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause.

He falls for Spacek’s schoolgirl, and when her surly father (a marvellous cameo by Warren Oates) objects, Sheen shoots him and the couple hit the road. Spacek narrates their adventure like a diary she is writing with pink lipstick. What gives the film its unsettling shocks are not the fatal bullets Sheen generously sprays into friends and luckless strangers. It’s the almost apologetic, sorry-about-that small talk, as if murder is a minor inconvenience.

The young stars are electric. Sheen’s fidgety Kit and Spacek’s infatuated Holly swap lines with such deadpan economy that you never know how to weigh their words. Spacek is almost obliged to run away with Sheen during the awkward pause after her father crumples in front of her eyes. The haunting soundtrack by Carl Orff and Erik Satie is curiously out of synch with the poppy beats of the 1950s.

What gives the film such monumental presence are the huge raw landscapes that Malick uses to frame the surreal journey to remote gas stations and far-flung hovels. These desolate vistas seem to ache. Malick has never quite recaptured the cruel magic. Badlands is the American West as a heartbreaking wasteland where dreams are exposed and crushed by the elements. Sheen and Spacek drift across these deserts like bits of paper. I don’t think there has ever been a more eerie trip to the electric chair.

15, 93 minutes

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010