Released in the wake of Dennis Hopper’s adored Easy Rider and mere months before his reviled follow-up The Last Movie, this beautiful and hypnotic road movie has always suffered from being sandwiched between the two.
Directed with a European stateliness by Monte Hellman, it stars musicians James Taylor and Dennis Wilson as two gnomic road warriors who cruise America’s faded byways in a 55 Chevy, racing for kicks. En route to, well, nowhere, they meet an older guy (Warren Oates), a former TV producer who challenges them to a race to Washington DC. But this is not a film about narrative but loneliness and life on the road, which it captures with a mysterious brilliance.
