20 best movies like True Stories (1986)

A nice guy has just moved to New York and discovers that he must share his run-down apartment with a couple thousand singing, dancing cockroaches.

'Pleasantly Plump' teenager Tracy Turnblad achieves her dream of becoming a regular on the Corny Collins Dance Show. Now a teen hero, she starts using her fame to speak out for the causes she believes in, most of all integration. In doing so, she earns the wrath of the show's former star, Amber Von Tussle, as well as Amber's manipulative, pro-segregation parents. The rivalry comes to a head as Amber and Tracy vie for the title of Miss Auto Show 1963.

A look at what goes on backstage during the last broadcast of America's most celebrated radio show, where singing cowboys Dusty and Lefty, a country music siren, and a host of others hold court

"Hair" is a 1979 musical war comedy-drama film adaptation of the 1968 Broadway musical "Hair: An American Tribal Love-Rock Musical" about a Vietnam War draftee, Claude, who meets and befriends a tribe of long-haired hippies on his way to the army induction center. Claude heads to New York upon receiving his draft notice, leaving the family ranch in Oklahoma. He arrives in New York where he is rapidly indoctrinated into the youth subculture before reporting in for boot camp.

Down-and-dirty musical love story set in the world of the working class. Nick is an ironworker who builds and repairs bridges. He's married to Kitty, a dressmaker, a strong and gentle woman with whom he has three daughters. He is carrying on a torrid affair with a redheaded woman named Tula. Nick is basically a good, hardworking man driven forward by will and blinded by his urges.

A young boy wins a tour through the most magnificent chocolate factory in the world, led by the world's most unusual candy maker.

The famous Captain Spaulding returns from Africa and attends a gala party where a valuable painting is stolen.

Once upon a time, the dashing hero, Prince Galavant lost the love of his life, Madalena, to the evil King Richard. Now, our fallen hero is ready to take revenge and restore his “happily ever after.” But it won't be without a few twists and turns along the way in this fairytale musical.

An awkward, unemployed man who can talk to the dead teams up with a rebellious bartender to find the vengeful ghost that's been terrorizing their town.

On a train trip West to become a mail-order bride, Susan Bradley meets a cheery crew of young women traveling out to open a "Harvey House" restaurant at a remote whistle-stop.

This film tells the tale of the Harper Affair, in which young Jimmy Harper finds his life of promise turn into a life of debauchery and murder thanks to the new drug menace marijuana. Along the way he receives help from his girlfriend Mary and Jesus himself, but always finds himself in the arms of the Reefer Man and the rest of the denizens of the Reefer Den.

A washed up Vegas lounge singer, Jack Satin (Hamilton von Watts), has no money, no job, and delusional aspirations of fame. When Jack is forced to leave Vegas, he packs up his old Cadillac and hits the road for Atlantic City. But his car dies in the desert and Jack is left stranded in the small town of Lost Springs. There, Jack meets jazz legend turned mechanic, Doc Bishop (Robert Guillaume), who helps him with his car trouble. Although Jack is far from the stage, he begins to find himself feeling at home in the small town. When he meets local bar owner, Lauren Wells (Melissa Joan Hart), Jack starts to see there is more to life than chasing fame and fortune. Doc encourages Jack to explore his true love of music, while Lauren provides the audience he has always wanted. But as Jack realizes this town has more to offer him than the bright lights of the big city, his Vegas past catches up with him -- what unfolds is comedy at the crossroads of life.

Movie star Roxy Carmichael is abandoning the bright lights of Hollywood, Calif. and returning to her small Ohio hometown -- at least long enough to dedicate a city building. And now the whole town of Clyde is bracing for Carmichael's return, most of all her now-married old flame Denton Webb and troubled teen Dinky Bossetti. An orphan with few friends, Dinky is convinced that Carmichael is her birth mother, and that the actress will reclaim her when she returns.

A teenager attends a fantasy writers' convention where he discovers his idea has been stolen by an established novelist.

The town sheriff and a madame team up to stop a television evangelist from shutting down the local whorehouse, the famed "Chicken Ranch."

Employees of the Sleeptite Pajama Factory are looking for a whopping seven-and-a-half cent an hour increase and they won't take no for an answer. Babe Williams is their feisty employee representative but she may have found her match in shop superintendent Sid Sorokin. When the two get together they wind up discussing a whole lot more than job actions! Written by A.L. Beneteau

In a post-apocalyptic world where the Russians have taken over a nuked USA and Elvis is king of Lost Vegas, Buddy is a '50s rocker and wandering warrior rolled into one, too-cool package. Armed with his six-string in one hand and his sword in the other, Buddy is on his way to Vegas to succeed Elvis as King. Along the way, he saves an orphan who decides to tag along.

Charles Price may have grown up with his father in the family shoe business in Northampton, in central England, but he never thought that he would take his father's place. Yet, the untimely death of his father places him in that position, only to learn that Price & Sons Shoes is failing. While in despair at his failed attempts to save the business, Charles has a chance encounter with the flamboyant drag queen cabaret singer, Lola. Her complaints about the inadequate footwear for her work combined with one of Charles' ex-employees, Lauren, leads to a suggestion to change the product to create a desperate chance to save the business: make men's fetish footwear. Lola is convinced to be their footwear designer and the transition begins. Now this disparate lot must struggle at this unorthodox idea while dealing both the prejudice of the staff, Lola's discomfort in the small town and the selfish manipulation of Charles' greedy fiancée who cannot see the greater good in Charles' dream.

If you had a love-potion, who would you make fall madly in love with you? Timothy, prone to escaping his dismal high school reality through dazzling musical daydreams, gets to answer that question in a very real way. After his eccentric teacher casts him as Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream, he stumbles upon a recipe hidden within the script to create the play's magical, purple love-pansy.

A con man comes to an Iowa town with a scam using a boy's marching band program, but things don't go according to plan.

From his hospital bed, a writer suffering from a skin disease hallucinates musical numbers and paranoid plots.

A shy Greenwich Village book clerk is discovered by a fashion photographer and whisked off to Paris where she becomes a reluctant model.

Solomon and Tummler are two teenagers killing time in Xenia, Ohio, a small town that has never recovered from the tornado that ravaged the community in the 1970s.

Vignettes weaving together the stories of six individuals in the old West at the end of the Civil War. Following the tales of a sharp-shooting songster, a wannabe bank robber, two weary traveling performers, a lone gold prospector, a woman traveling the West to an uncertain future, and a motley crew of strangers undertaking a carriage ride.

Sylvia Stickles runs a convenience store with her husband and mother-in-law. One day, Sylvia is hit on the head and transforms from an uptight prude to a sex-crazed lunatic. As she goes on a rampage through town, Sylvia attracts the attention of Ray Ray, a sexual healer and tow truck driver in search of the world's greatest orgasm. Their sexual revolution, however, causes a class war in their tiny Baltimore community.

A struggling young musician and devoted fan of Ricky Nelson wants to be just like his idol and become a rock star.

Earl and Baby, two young lovers with a plan to escape their small Texas town. But when Baby's dim-witted cousin Junior gets tangled up in a whole heap of trouble, Earl has just 48 hours to save the day, rescue Junior and keep his promise to get his Baby to Los Angeles in time for sweeps.

Marcel Marx, a former bohemian and struggling author, has given up his literary ambitions and relocated to the port city Le Havre. He leads a simple life based around his wife Arletty, his favourite bar and his not too profitable profession as a shoeshiner. As Arletty suddenly becomes seriously ill, Marcel's path crosses with an underage illegal immigrant from Africa, who needs Marcel's help to hide from the police.

Miles Monroe, a clarinet-playing health food store proprietor, is revived out of cryostasis 200 years into a future world in order to help rebels fight an oppressive government regime.

Salvatore "Sal" Fragione is the Italian owner of a pizzeria in Brooklyn. A neighborhood local, Buggin' Out, becomes upset when he sees that the pizzeria's Wall of Fame exhibits only Italian actors. Buggin' Out believes a pizzeria in a black neighborhood should showcase black actors, but Sal disagrees. The wall becomes a symbol of racism and hate to Buggin' Out and to other people in the neighborhood, and tensions rise.

With the rent due and his car booted, Sean (Dr. Dre) has to come up with some ends...and fast. When his best buddy and roommate Dee Loc (Snoop Dogg), suggests that Sean get a job busting suds down at the local car wash.

Joe Young is a devout Mormon living in L.A. trying to raise enough money to go back to Utah and marry his girlfriend, Lisa. Joe is spreading the word about the church of Latter Day Saints one day when he's confronted by two burly bodyguards. A scuffle breaks out, and Joe's martial arts skills impress Maxxx Orbison, who directs pornographic movies.

A Russian circus visits the US. A clown wants to defect, but doesn't have the nerve. His saxophone playing friend however comes to the decision to defect in the middle of Bloomingdales. He is befriended by the black security guard and falls in love with the Italian immigrant from behind the perfume counter. We follow his life as he works his way through the American dream and tries to find work as a musician.

A tribe of cats called the Jellicles must decide yearly which one will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new Jellicle life.

For Beary Barrington, The Country Bears' young #1 fan, fitting in with his all-too-human family is proving im-paws-ible. When he runs away to find Country Bear Hall and his heroes, he discovers the venue that made them famous is near foreclosure. Beary hightails it over the river and through the woods to get the Bears in the Band back together for an all-out reunion concert to save Country Bear Hall.

Maya is living the ultimate fashionistas dream: she is working as a stylist for one of the French trend setters, in the capital of haute-couture: Paris. One of the IT girls of fashion, shes following her dreams until one night, when her life takes a sudden turn: shes being deported back to Morocco, after being stopped for over speeding, because her Visa expired some time ago. So in no more than 24 hours, shes deported back to her family and original country. The strong cultural shock and the judgmental differences are pushing the woman to obtain back her place in the city of dreams and her dreams, no matter the costs. But that doesn't mean she will have to return alone, as she finds other things also among her way back to the city.

Tired of the noise and madness of New York and the crushing conventions of late Eisenhower-era America, itinerant journalist Paul Kemp travels to the pristine island of Puerto Rico to write for a local San Juan newspaper run by the downtrodden editor Lotterman. Adopting the rum-soaked lifestyle of the late ‘50s version of Hemingway’s “The Lost Generation,” Paul soon becomes entangled with a very attractive American woman, Chenaults and her fiancée Sanderson, a businessman involved in shady property development deals.  It is within this world that Kemp ultimately discovers his true voice as a writer and integrity as a man.

Ren MacCormack is transplanted from Boston to the small southern town of Bomont where loud music and dancing are prohibited. Not one to bow to the status quo, Ren challenges the ban, revitalizing the town and falling in love with the minister’s troubled daughter Ariel in the process.

After being struck and killed by lightning, a young man recounts the way he blackmailed his fellow classmates into contributing to his literary magazine.

When Dot's granddaughter puts her into a nursing home, Stella stages a breakout, and takes Dot to Canada so they can get married. They pick up a hitchhiker along the way.

After a talent scout spots her performing with her dog Boi at a charity gala, Sharpay Evans sets off for the bright lights of NYC, convinced instant fame and fortune are in the bag. But theatre's a dog-eat-dog world. Fortunately, Sharpay also meets Peyton, a handsome student filmmaker who finds Sharpay nearly as fascinating as she finds herself.

A lonely, sexually repressed man. A depressed woman. A summer camp. On this fateful night, they will meet . . . and their hearts will become one.

A singer goes to a small town for a performance before he is drafted.

Eugene and Rick are two struggling artists who share apartment. However, Rick has problems with that, because Eugene is obsessed with pulp fiction comic books and has nightmares because of that. Rick soon finds that those nightmares could be excellent material for writing his own comic books.

A mentally unhinged factory worker must decide whether to listen to his talking cat and become a killer, or follow his dog's advice to keep striving for normalcy.

Marcy, a worker in the reelection campaign of bumbling Senator John McGlory, is sent to Ireland on a quest to find the Irish ancestry of Sen. McGlory, to help him win the Irish vote. But when Marcy arrives in the small village of Ballinagra, she finds herself in the middle of a matchmaking festival, and the local matchmaker is determined to pair her off with one of the local bachelors.

Fed up with the cruelty and stupidity of American culture, an unlikely duo goes on a killing spree, killing reality TV stars, bigots and others they find repugnant in this black comedy.

In the 1940s in the small town of Jupiter Hollow, two sets of identical twins are born in the same hospital on the same night. One set to a poor local family and the other to a rich family just passing through. The dizzy nurse on duty accidentally mixes the twins unbeknown to the parents. Our story flashes forward to the 1980s where the mismatched sets of twins are about to cross paths.

The heroic story of a dictator who risks his life to ensure that democracy would never come to the country he so lovingly oppressed.

In the 1980s a group of foreign-born Korean teenagers who meet at a Seoul summer camp to learn what it means to be Korean. The three boys, from the U.S., Mexico, and Germany, then meet three girls who rock their world.