Christian Slater was the James Dean of the late 80s and early 1990s, a rock star-like figure with the kind of mesmeric screen presence that could send otherwise perfectly ordinary teen movies into cult classic territory. He epitomised the sort of determined outsiderdom that I, a spotty young indie kid growing up in rural Norfolk, wore with even greater pomp than my Ride T-shirt and Doc Marten boots.

Slater always seemed to play the new kid in town, a mysterious stranger primed to cause chaos in whichever suburb of middle America he happened to be passing through. In 1990's underrated Pump Up the Volume he is plain old high school newbie Mark Hunter, who during the day struggles inexplicably to talk to girls and sits alone eating his lunchtime sandwiches. At night, however, he puts on a Leonard Cohen record or two and – like a sort of hipster Bananaman – is transformed into pirate radio shock-jock Happy Harry Hard-on, broadcasting to the youth of his rural Arizona home town with a Bill Hicks-like blend of horndog tomfoolery and charismatic insightfulness.

Soon he is encouraging the local teens to throw off the shackles of conformity and listen to some Jesus and Mary Chain records. Next he summons up the courage to romance the unutterably cool Samantha Mathis and bring down the evil local high-school headmistress in one fabulous stroke. The teenage me wondered if by listening to a few Mudhoney cassettes I might undergo a similar transformation.

Winona Ryder and Christian Slater in 1989's Heathers. Photograph: 20th C Fox/Everett/Rex

Later I discovered Slater's earlier film Heathers, which turned out to be even more anarchic. Here, our hero does not just shake up a small town where the local youth have been forced to study for their exams and (presumably) listen to rubbish music; he punishes the local populace for their conformity to stereotypical American high-school tropes by murdering them and pretending they committed suicide. He smokes cigarettes like a boss, and does unspeakable things to Winona Ryder in the back of a beaten-up Ford. And all without having to purchase a single Sub Pop 12-inch.

Michael Lehmann's sardonic, amoral black comedy seemed vastly preferably to the slightly hokey melodrama of Pump up the Volume. And yet there was something not entirely lovable about Slater's suspiciously monikered Jason Dean - possibly something to do with his being a rabid sociopath. I too, hated the pumped-up jock and vapid prom-queen equivalents of my own peer group, but murdering them in cold blood seemed a bit drastic when simply passing one's A-levels and getting into a university in a more interesting part of the country was available as an alternative option.

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Slater's greatest role, and the one that made me want to be him all over again, arrived as I found myself at sixth form concocting the aforementioned escape plan. 1993's True Romance was directed by Top Gun's Tony Scott, but it dripped with the calorific, full-fat insouciance of screenwriter Quentin Tarantino. Slater played movie geek Clarence Worley, who manages to pick up the gorgeous Alabama (Patricia Arquette) simply by being in a cinema watching cool old Japanese movies by himself. It so happened I was in a cinema watching Pulp Fiction solo, but weirdly there were no devastatingly attractive buxom blondes to be seen at the Odeon in Norwich's Anglia Square.

Still, Worley's decent-hearted everyman seemed to deserve his good fortune, even if by default. While he and Alabama get brownie points for a repeated willingness to sacrifice their lives for each other, everyone else in the movie is fuelled by greed, stupidity, hubris or an apparently overly plentiful supply of strong cannabis. And who can begrudge a chap who is wise enough to take advice from an imaginary Elvis he meets in the toilets?