10 Best Movies Set In Michigan, Ranked

The United States of America is a big enough place that the concept of “Anywhere, USA” really could be set, well, anywhere. Sure, the idea indicates someplace that isn’t one of the big cities, a town or city that seems cozy and placid on the outside (whether or not that’s the truth underneath). Typically, this means “Anywhere, USA” in cinematic terms tends to land in the Midwest, and even with that geographical narrowing down, it still leaves a lot of ground to be covered. So what does Michigan mean as a setting? What sets it apart from the more commonly used Illinois or Ohio? Does it have its own identity at all?

Full disclosure: I grew up a Michigan boy, and lived in Ann Arbor for the majority of my young life. This means I also took a tour of a large portion of the state during those years; vacationing at Mackinac Island and the Sleeping Bear Dunes, visiting that no man’s land (or Canada, part II) known as the UP, getting a taste of small town living in Luzerne and Dexter, and venturing into the triumph and tragedy of the great city of Detroit. Life in Michigan is often cold, but it’s just as hearty, and for as much loneliness, fear, and desperation you’ll find there, you’ll find just as much heart and fortitude, too. Michigan on film is as much of a potpourri as movies set in major metropolitan areas; after all, you get two whole land masses for the price of one, all filled with a million kinds of stories. Michigan is all at once the end of America and the soulful center of its people, a place of tragedy and triumph. Hail to the victors and come with me on our tour through the best of Michigan cinema.

The filmmaking scamps known as Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell, and Scott Spiegel grew up in Michigan, and the state helped form their combination of twisted humor and wicked charm. While most of their output was set in other states (“The Evil Dead,” for instance, is suffused with the vibe of rural Tennessee), “Intruder,” directed by Spiegel and co-starring Raimi and Campbell, seeks to capture the environment Spiegel experienced while working at the Walnut Lake Market in West Bloomfield, Michigan, and boy, does it succeed.

A slasher that fully takes place inside this fictionalized version of the market, “Intruder” showcases just how inventive Michigan filmmakers (especially this crew) can be, showcasing wild compositions (such as a shot from inside of a telephone) as well as even wilder kills (like the infamous bisected head sequence). Most of all, the film accurately captures the camaraderie of co-workers as well as the dangerous insanity that can emerge after a life of clerking: if you don’t watch out, you may grow to love your store a little too much.

In stark contrast to the industrialization of Flint and the modernity of Detroit lies the figuratively and literally preserved Mackinac Island, a place whose entire appeal is that it feels as if it’s trapped in the country’s past. That quality was brilliantly exploited by director Jeannot Szwarc and writer Richard Matheson when making “Somewhere in Time,” with Matheson adapting the script from his novel “Bid Time Return” and changing the location from San Diego to Michigan for just this reason.

Szwarc makes excellent use of the on-location shooting in Mackinac, centering the story in and around the island’s Grand Hotel. The film acts as such a great advertisement for the destination that the shooting of the movie marks one of the few occasions where the island permitted motor vehicles to be brought over — typically, they only allow horse-drawn carriages and non-motorized transport on the island. Stars Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour convey the sense of becoming wrapped up in the surreal romance of their environment, helping legitimize Matheson’s admittedly kooky notion of time travel not as physics-breaking movement but metaphysical hypnotic suggestion. In a place like Mackinac, you genuinely do feel like you’ve moved back in time, and if you believe it, who’s to say it’s not actually true?

With some notable (and obvious) exceptions, Michigan isn’t necessarily a horrible place to live. Yet if you’re in a part of the state that’s less than pleasant, and/or the cold just starts to get to you, it’s easy to start dreaming of escaping to someplace nicer. Clarence (Christian Slater) in “True Romance” is a quintessential dreamer, a man feeling stuck and lonely in his life who constantly turns to comic books and movies in order to escape his stagnant reality. Alabama (Patricia Arquette), a sex worker hired to fall in love with Clarence on his birthday, ends up falling in love with Clarence for real, the two bonding over a shared need to escape the dregs of Detroit. Together, they make their dreams a reality, not just their dream of true romance but of becoming sexy, vivacious, wanted badass criminals.

The relationship between Detroit and Los Angeles (where Clarence and Alabama escape to, and where the second half of the film takes place) isn’t just seen in this film; it’s a staple of the “Beverly Hills Cop” series, too, in which Eddie Murphy keeps getting involved in cases that concern both the Motor City and the City of Angels. Yet director Tony Scott (who also directed “Beverly Hills Cop II”) gives “True Romance” a bit more grit in the depiction of Detroit in “True Romance.” From Clarence’s attack on pimp Drexl Spivey (Gary Oldman) to the infamous confrontation between mafioso Coccotti (Christopher Walken) and Clarence’s father Clifford (Dennis Hopper), the film understands how hard boiled the freezing cold Detroit can be.

After three “Beverly Hills Cop” films and “True Romance,” it seems appropriate that the expat Michiganders who fled to Los Angeles should be called back home, and that’s exactly what happens to Martin Q. Blank (John Cusack) in “Grosse Pointe Blank.” As the title suggests, Martin is called back home to Grosse Pointe, Michigan, for his ten-year high school reunion, and in this film the town (and the state it resides within) acts as a sort of moral reckoning for Blank, who’s become a professional assassin ever since he moved away.

In this fashion, the movie explores the Michigander’s desire for flight from the opposite perspective. Blank keeps trying to avoid going back home and attending his reunion, only to find that reconnecting with his past allows him to find true love (in the form of Minnie Driver’s Debi) as well as rethink his life and career choices up to this point. While Grosse Pointe isn’t portrayed as some Norman Rockwellian idealized American town, the film treats it and Michigan as a place that has a moral center, unlike the seedier world where Blank has been led astray.

The part of Michigan known for its industrial contributions is one that can be celebrated, especially in period films depicting the golden age of motor vehicles manufacturing, movies like “Tucker: The Man and His Dream” and “Ford v. Ferrari.” Yet there’s also a rot and despair that is unavoidable when taking the economic decline of Detroit into account, a sickness that emerges from the dark heart of capitalism in America, one which can infect even the most honest of working men. Paul Schrader’s “Blue Collar” depicts this disease perfectly, showcasing the struggle of three auto plant workers (played by Yaphet Kotto, Harvey Keitel, and Richard Pryor in a rare dramatic turn) who start out being taken advantage of by the system and concoct a plan to rob money from the union that refuses to represent them properly.

After the semi-successful heist, things only get worse for the three men, as one is made into a literal target to be eliminated, another has his soul bought, and the other becomes a stool pigeon paranoid wreck. Shot on location in Kalamazoo and Detroit, Grand Rapids’ own Schrader innately understands the desperation and encroaching darkness that can lurk in and around the automobile plants, making the film a powerfully haunting tragedy.

With “The Virgin Suicides,” we’re back in Grosse Pointe again. Yet where “Grosse Pointe Blank” saw the town as a comforting blanket for its characters, the Lisbon sisters in Sofia Coppola’s film find it far more smothering. Although Coppola inherited the film’s setting from the book it adapts (written by Detroit-born author Jeffrey Eugenides), she makes the Michigan suburb feel positively eerie without ever dipping too far into surrealism. Within the swirl of metaphor and commentary that Coppola deftly weaves into the movie, its setting makes Michigan a stand-in for the dangers of nostalgia, the unavoidable patriarchal structure of society, and the inevitable loss of innocence which attends a coming of age. Given that American audiences might watch Peter Weir’s “Picnic at Hanging Rock” (this film’s spiritual ancestor) with some measure of distance if they’re not too familiar with Australia, Coppola makes sure “The Virgin Suicides” hits close to home.

So, Michigan can be gritty, it can be heartbreaking, it can be lonely, and it can be hopeful. But can it be sexy? Leave it to cinematic scamp Steven Soderbergh to set one of cinema’s all-time sexiest scenes in a Michigan restaurant. In “Out of Sight,” adapted from the novel by Elmore Leonard, bank robber Jack Foley (George Clooney) is pursued by U.S. Marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez), and in the midst of each trying to outfox the other, they can’t help but discover a mutual attraction. This tension boils over in a scene set in a restaurant on top of the Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit, in which Foley and Sisco finally give in to their chemistry.

“Out of Sight” is a film that oozes cool, capturing a ’70s-meets-’90s swagger almost effortlessly. In a movie that bounces around the country, with one of the locations being freakin’ Miami of all places, it’s part of Soderbergh’s perverse charm that he makes a point to have the film’s heat boil over in a traditionally cold city like Detroit. It’s a very cool contrast, and like I said, “Out of Sight” defines “cool.”

Growing up in Michigan feels all at once idyllic and ominous. The suburbs have a protective bubble around them, with so many long, lazy days and nights filled with having chill hang sessions with your friends. Yet you have the pervasive feeling that, just around the corner, there lurks the specter of responsibilities, of heartbreak, of tragedy, of adulthood. Of course, this specter is given physical form in David Robert Mitchell’s “It Follows,” a horror film that helped kick off the last decade’s indie horror boom, demonstrating how J-Horror tropes could be fused to quintessentially American settings and themes, resulting in a film that’s as terrifying as it is thoughtful and artful.

Shot and set in Detroit, “It Follows” utilizes the Michigan suburbs and their proximity to the Big Bad City in a very fairy tale fashion, with one character openly stating how their parents used to forbid them from crossing a certain street when growing up, just as they and their companions cross that very street as they seek to somehow stop the unstoppable demon that follows the last person to become marked by it through sexual contact. Of course, it shares some themes with “The Virgin Suicides” and other coming-of-age parables, yet “It Follows” isn’t so much about a loss of innocence as it is about the real world invading every last safe space you thought you had. For my money, I haven’t seen another state in America that places the safe and the dangerous so close together as it is in Michigan, and “It Follows” makes excellent use of that quality.

Mind you, this list is ranking the best movies to make use of the state of Michigan, so anyone who has beef with “Reindeer Games” being ranked this high can take it up with my Pioneer High diploma. Besides, I maintain that John Frankenheimer’s final feature film is an unheralded gem, especially in its proper director’s cut form, with the machismo-minded director making this sleazy heist drama a fractured, demented riff on “It’s a Wonderful Life.” As poor ex-con Rudy (Ben Affleck) struggles to stay alive and hide his identity from a psychotic trucker-turned-criminal, Gabriel (Gary Sinise) — masked because of his duplicitous relationship with the trucker’s sister, Ashley (Charlize Theron) — Frankenheimer has the motley crew of criminals traipse around the Upper Peninsula at Christmas time.

This tour isn’t the Winter Wonderland one might hope for, but rather a gritty trip through prisons, seedy motels, and washed-up casinos, the latter two suffused with so much garish neon and chilly blues that you can practically smell the stale cigarette smoke that’s fused with the walls of every room. In this way, Michigan is a stand-in for a wintry Hell, a never ending purgatory where cheap pleasures come with a heavy price. Not to give too much away, but the state also provides idyllic, hopeful promise toward the end, too, proving that Michigan, like “Reindeer Games,” does indeed contain lots of twists and turns.

I said earlier that Michigan feels like both the end and the beginning of America, and no other film encapsulates that concept better than Paul Verhoeven’s “RoboCop.” On the one hand, the movie’s vision of a cyberpunk, fascist dystopia is immediately apparent, fusing “Death Wish,” “The Running Man,” and “Blade Runner” into an unholy amalgam of corporate-controlled existence, where a board of directors make decisions that literally result in people living or dying at their greedy whim. The streets of future Detroit are riddled with crime, and to call the police corrupt is to be unfair — in the world of “RoboCop,” everyone is corrupt, and those who aren’t are made an example of, like Alex Murphy (Peter Weller).

Yet just as Detroit taketh away, Detroit also giveth: Murphy is, of course, resurrected as RoboCop, intended as a literal tool of the oppressors. But the man’s soul is not so easily reprogrammed, and like the good Michigan boy he is, Alex Murphy takes the cybernetic abilities given to him and uses them in the name of true justice. It’s very telling that Verhoeven chose to set his Jesus parable in Detroit; whether it’s in Motown, its workforce, or its resilience, the city has an abundance of soul, and it’s that soul which could help save the country, if not humanity. Sure, the film was primarily shot in Dallas, Texas, and its analogous nature means it could be considered Anywhere, USA. But just this year, the RoboCop statue, first proposed in 2011, has been completed, and is due to stand proudly in Detroit’s Eastern Market. As such, I can’t think of a better state mascot then Alex J. Murphy, and if you wanna see him, you gotta go to Michigan.