Once a great western movie star Howard Spence (Shepard) is now a washed-up, selfish alcoholic who spends his days whoring and drinking. After another night on the tiles and between the thighs, Howard has an epiphany and vows to change his life. Mounting a horse, he flees the set of his latest mediocre film and disappears. Without a leading man, the crew calls the insurance company and detective Sutter (Roth) is put on the case. Little does he know that Spence has headed home to his mother's (Eva Marie Saint) in Nevada where, over a nostalgic look through a scrap book of press clippings documenting his wild life, his mother tells him of a young girl named Doreen (Lange) from the small town of Butte who called her thirty years ago with news of his unborn child. Spence leaves for Butte in search of Doreen (with Sutter in hot pursuit) and finds her easily enough. However, Doreen's child is not the only offspring Spence sired in the small town. Reuniting after 21 years (Shepard penned Wender's Paris, Texas), Don't Come Knocking is a welcome return for a team who don't bow to convention. Although littered with Shepard's laconic understatements (Lange's first words after seeing Shepard is "Well, you took long enough"), Don't Come Knocking is unusually upbeat for both writer and director and contains some deadpan lines that one might see Bill Murray deliver. But Wenders is still Wenders and his painfully slow (some might say meticulous, others say boring) directing is still in evidence here. As usual with a Shepard script, there is a lot of time spent of getting the dialogue to sound natural and Don't Come Knocking is no different.
