Out of Time brings together the protagonists’ return with a sense of irreversible change. The song lets us hear the closeness of a farewell even as the images show a homecoming.
The orchestral version of Metamorphosis
The recording of Out of Time used in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is the orchestral version included on Metamorphosis, The Rolling Stones compilation released in 1975. ABKCO explicitly identifies that version as the one featured in the film. It is not worth substituting the Aftermath recording when describing the effect of the scene: they share the same song, but the arrangement and texture create a different listening experience.
The release date of Metamorphosis does not mean the composition was born in 1975. The album brings together earlier material and alternate versions. In any case, the film uses the piece as accompaniment to a montage, without requiring a character to be listening in 1969 to an album released later. The difference between music coming from a visible radio and music that shapes the narrative helps avoid an automatic diagnosis of chronological error.
Mick Jagger’s voice is surrounded by an arrangement of orchestral breadth that softens and expands the song’s momentum. That combination encourages an ambivalent emotion: it can sound elegant and welcoming while introducing a sense of temporal mismatch. The melody invites us to follow the journey; the title reminds us that someone may have fallen out of the time that was meant for them. The film draws part of its force from keeping both sensations together.
The track does not appear on the official 31-track soundtrack. So anyone trying to reconstruct the musical experience from the album alone may notice an important absence. To identify what is heard in this sequence, one must pay attention to the specific version and its placement in the film, as well as consult the commercial track listing for the album.
Coming back does not mean getting the same life back
The song accompanies the stretch of Rick and Cliff’s return to Los Angeles after their working stay in Italy. Its function begins before the night gathers the threat of the ending. Describing it only as the music of neon lights coming on, or as a song that plays throughout the night sequence, would confuse different moments in the soundtrack. Here the main movement is a return marked by personal and professional changes.
Rick returns accompanied by Francesca, and the continuity of his working relationship with Cliff can no longer be taken for granted. The city remains recognisable, but the conditions with which they enter it have changed. The song lets the physical journey and that emotional shift move forward together. The airport and the journey afterwards are not merely a logistical transition between two parts of the plot: they make visible that the return contains a possible separation.
The contrast is especially clear because the film had spent a great deal of time showing shared routines. Driving, working, talking and watching television had built a sense of familiarity. The music returns over characters who retain that history, even if they now have to decide how to carry on living. Its melancholic power depends on what the viewer has already seen, so the montage can suggest a loss without retelling every episode of the friendship.
The lyrics do not need to function as an exact translation of Rick’s thoughts. A song can comment on a situation from a position that no character fully articulates. The montage allows the theme to be linked with the actor’s professional mismatch, with the end of a stage of life alongside Cliff, and with a change of era. These readings rest on the relationship between sound and image, without turning Jagger into a literal narrator of the fictional biography.
The viewer listens from another time
The August setting introduces a second temporality: that of the audience who knows what happened historically on Cielo Drive. For that viewer, returning to Los Angeles also means moving towards a night whose outcome seems known. The song can then take on a broader tone of farewell than the protagonists’ working conflict. The everyday images retain their beauty while information outside them changes the way they are received.
That double listening prevents melancholy from belonging to just one person. Rick may worry about his earnings and his future; Sharon may be living through a day without knowing the threat the audience anticipates. The montage brings together lives that do not share all the information. The music offers them a shared emotional space, even if each character continues to act from different concerns and without access to the viewer’s historical knowledge.
The orchestral arrangement contributes to that expansiveness because it allows the sequence to breathe. It does not push each shot towards immediate urgency or demand constant acceleration. The beauty of the sound retains something of a stroll and an act of observation, even when the idea of lost time weighs on the whole. The film can move closer to danger while keeping attention on faces, movements and places that deserve to be seen in their own right.
After the ending, the sequence allows another reading. The historical threat that seemed to guide the listening does not come to pass in the way expected within the fiction. Out of Time then retains its relationship with change, but ceases to be only a pre-emptive elegy. The film has used a song charged with farewell to accompany characters whose fate can still change, and that possibility retrospectively turns the sadness of the return into a less closed emotion.
More context in the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood guide.