Easy Rider

Two bikers transport cocaine across the American Southwest while being violently verbally and physically assaulted by small-town squares and murderous hill jacks in this quintessential "cultural touchstone" for the Hippie Generation. Directed by Dennis Hopper, it stars Hopper, Peter Fonda, and a young and handsome Jack Nicholson. Hopper plays "Billy"; Fonda is "Wyatt" or "Captain America" (he has a jacket with an American flag patch on the back that, during that era, would have been considered offensive). Nicholson is a drunken ACLU lawyer in a small-town jail. As they roar down the hot highway, headed toward New Orleans and the promise of a paradisiacal bacchanal called "Mardi Gras," we get an expansive view of the environment through which they drive their souped-up hogs. It's an amazing American landscape, as perfect as a Western landscape portrait, wherein scrubby arroyo is the unsmiling subject, its flat and desolate face punctured by huge grasping fingers of sacred stone thrusting upward to the blue murder sky. (Quoth Harrelson in Natural Born Killers, "Well, now that is poetry.")

In between, the two dropouts from Squarejohn American society are on an odyssey that takes them from the fringe environs of a Manson-like desert commune (wherein the pseudo-mystical and highly pretentious, bored social dropout farmer-utopians pray before devouring their luscious vegetarian repast) to the brutal insides of a tank-town jailhouse, wherein unfriendly, brutal cowboy-cum-deputy warders tell them they're too much the animal, senors, to have a cigarette. Luckily, Nicholson is on hand to smooth things over with the yokels. (He's the bad boy, alcoholic, but otherwise, thoroughly alright lawyer dude who does a weird thing with his arm when he drinks some particularly strong rotgut. He's disheveled, but noticeably better-treated than Wyatt and Billy, whose long hair and biker barbarian-slash-libertarian Freak Flag clothing sets them apart from the killer townies, to put it mildly.)

Nicholson ("George") goes from his weekend stint in jail to riding like a giddy bitch on the back of Fonda's chopper, but things don't end up going very well for him in the end. Along the way, there are philosophical discussions centered around the colonization of Earth by Venus, as well as some dope smoking (not faked) and the general feeling that Nicholson's character represents the straight, bourgeois legal, and respectable spear tip that Fonda and Hopper live most authentically. They have dropped out of the society that Nicholson is trying to shove in a particular direction.

Death rides with Wyatt and Billy, and the world is shown to be as brutal as we surmised two barbarians would discover on their motorbike ride across the United States. Once they finally set foot on Louisiana soil, we get a psychedelic plunge past the gates of Hell, as mother-hatred, Jesus Christ-invoking, mysterious umbrella-swinging strangers, and two whores help the boys descend like Merry Prankster astronauts of "inner spaces" (to borrow a term from the late Sixties and Seventies radical sex and culturally proscribed underground documentarian, the late Charles Gatewood) to a place wherein they can comfortably, I don't know, DIE.

This film was dreamed of last night and registered as a Midnight Movie I had yet to write about. It was a watershed, a cultural "touchstone," and a HUGE financial success upon its release. It's a huge, largely plotless, pseudo-documentary that is quite fascinating—so much so that you've watched over half of it before you even realize you've started. It doesn't demand much from the viewer except one hour and thirty-odd minutes of his or her TIME.

Performances are excellent. Perfect. Iconic, even. The common people don't fare very well in the particularly brutal lens of common "American Values" offered here. But what do you expect?

The soundtrack is Sixties psychedelia and rock, Steppenwolf and "Born to Be Wild" most famously, but there is folk, jazz, and country, and Simon and Garfunkel seem to be hiding somewhere in the bushes. Maybe they've been made invisible by colonizing Venusians; who knows? You'd have to tune in, turn on, and drop out for the answer.

Easy Rider | Original Trailer [HD] | Coolidge Corner Theatre

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Tom Baker