For all the forgotten talk of the indie film “renaissance” of the early 1990s — though expect the IFC documentary and critical reassessment of turkeys like Four Rooms or Sleep With Me anytime now — no filmmaker from that era ever had an edge on director Alex Cox.

When the Tarantinos of the world were collecting their short-lived accolades, Cox had just closed out the dark ages of the 1980s making uncompromising cinema by any means or monies possible: Hollywood studios, the Sandinistas, ex-members of The Monkees; whatever worked.
Like fellow lunatic Sam Fuller, Cox’s oeuvre can seem maddeningly varied but in his autobiography X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker (Soft Skull, 312 pages, $19.95), they’re threaded into a whole work ripped from the brain of one smooth-talking anarchist.

Cox’s first feature was Repo Man, a 92-minute testament to the glory of Harry Dean Stanton. Cox followed with Sid and Nancy, a still powerful and blatantly fictionalized (and somehow truer for it) take on the Sex Pistols myth. He also covers Walker, an agit-prop masterpiece that only grows more prescient with age. Regrettably, Cox also made the sloppy spaghetti western mess Straight to Hell. It’s his Cannonball Run and he admits here the script was written in three days to take advantage of having several Brit rock stars with cleared schedules.

Cox writes about all his films in an orderly fashion and with sly wit. After all, this is the man who birthed the line “I didn’t know pigs could swim.” With minimal biographical noodling, his film histories end up reading better than many novels. In each chapter there are big hopes, medium-sized crises and small triumphs, as when Repo Man was abandoned by its studio and dumped direct-to-video. After the film’s soundtrack album of LA punk scorchers sold 50,000 copies, Repo Man was re-released to acclaim, cult status and eminent quotablity. Cox is surprisingly sanguine in the face of such distribution fates. His best film — El Patrullero, an austere morality play set among Mexico’s samurai-like highway patrol — is also his least seen.

For all the rollicking tales, and ups and downs in X Films’ pages, there’s little vengeful gossip. Which is a shame, because Cox’s take on the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas debacle, which saw him booted off the film days before shooting, would be revealing. Like any good book written by a director, though, there is a scad of sage advice not taught in any film school: how do you control a junkie composer enough to finish your film soundtrack? How do you respond to your completion bond company once they find out you’re filming an anti-imperialist acid-Western in Nicaragua in the middle of a covert war?

Cox ends X Films without much bitterness, even waving goodbye to 35mm film and cautiously approving digital tools. He advises, “As an independent filmmaker you are 1) greatly empowered; and 2) even more alone. 1) is good because you have the means of production. 2) is bad because filmmaking is a communal, collaborative medium…Just because you have a camera and editing software doesn’t make you a DP or an editor.”

Now if someone could just tell Robert Rodriguez that.