Easy Rider (1969) Review
7/10
Two men sell cocaine at an airfield, hide the money in a fuel tank, and ride east from Los Angeles toward New Orleans. They’re going to Mardi Gras. They have no plan beyond arriving. The 7 is for a film whose achievement is entirely structural and whose execution is patchy. Long stretches are two men riding to music with no dialogue, the acid sequence is close to unwatchable, and the film was assembled from an enormous quantity of footage by people who weren’t certain what they had.
Parts of this film bore me stiff, and the rest of it I wouldn’t trade.
Nicholson wakes the picture up the moment he appears, and the last four minutes land like a slammed door. The riding montages I could lose half of. That’s how a film gets a 7 from me: I admire it and argue with it, and I mostly endure its middle hour.
What it gets right is the ending. That withdraws the journey before it can mean anything. That refusal is the road movie’s most honest available conclusion and almost nothing since has been willing to repeat it.
The Structure Was New
Before this, American films about travel had destinations. A man goes somewhere to do something and the film is about whether he arrives. Here the destination is a festival nobody cares about and the film is about the country between.
That’s the form this picture invented. Episodes instead of a plot, strangers encountered and left behind, a landscape that changes faster than the characters do, and an arrival that resolves nothing.
Laszlo Kovacs shot it largely in available light with a small crew. That gives the riding sequences a documentary quality the studio pictures of the period couldn’t produce. The road looks like a road instead of like a set. The music is the other structural innovation and it’s now so standard nobody notices it. Existing recordings used as score, chosen for meaning instead of mood, playing over long passages with no dialogue. Every road film since has done this and this is where it started. The tracks were reportedly temporary, laid in during editing and never replaced because nothing written for the film worked as well. That accident produced the convention. That’s a useful reminder that a great deal of what becomes standard practice began as somebody failing to find an alternative.
An episodic structure needs something other than plot to hold it. Here it’s a question the film keeps asking in different ways. That’s whether the country the characters believe in exists.
The test for an episode is whether it changes what the reader expects from the next one. The commune, the jail, the diner and the campfire each adjust the answer. That’s why they accumulate instead of merely occurring. If your episodes are interchangeable in order, you’ve written a sequence instead of a structure, and readers feel the arbitrariness even when they can’t name it.
Nicholson Walks Off With It
George Hanson is a small-town lawyer, alcoholic, well connected and entirely unhappy, who joins them for a stretch and is beaten to death by locals a few nights later.
He appears about halfway through and the film improves immediately, because he’s the only character in it who talks. Wyatt and Billy communicate in grunts and gestures, and Hanson arrives with a vocabulary, a background and an argument. The campfire speech is the film’s thesis and it’s the best writing in it. America talks about freedom constantly and is frightened of anybody who really takes it, because a free man is proof that the rest of them chose their cages.
A man who will be dead before morning delivers that speech. That’s the film’s construction at its sharpest. The person about to be killed for showing it states the argument.
Nicholson wasn’t the first choice and took the part late, and the performance made his career after a decade of low-budget work.
What he brings is enjoyment, and the film badly needed some. Hanson is delighted to be on the road, delighted to be drinking, delighted by his own theory about aliens. I adore every minute he’s on screen, and the film feels emptier the second he’s gone.
The Two Leads Are the Problem
Peter Fonda’s Wyatt is serene, silent and largely opaque. Dennis Hopper’s Billy is paranoid, chattering and abrasive. Neither is written with much beyond a temperature.
That thinness is partly deliberate and mostly a consequence of how the film was made. Hopper shot enormous amounts of improvised material and the characters were assembled in the cut from whatever cohered.
The first assembly reportedly ran several hours, and getting it down to a releasable length took months of work done without a script to measure the footage against. That’s close to the least efficient route anybody has ever taken toward a film that would end up mattering this much to the entire decade of American cinema that came along in the years right after it.
It costs the film in the middle. Long stretches ask an audience to be interested in two men who haven’t been given interiors, and the interest has to come from the landscape and the soundtrack instead.
What saves it is the last exchange. Wyatt says they blew it, Billy doesn’t understand, and the film declines to explain. One short line reframes the whole trip, spoken by a character who has said almost nothing for ninety minutes. I think Fonda’s flat delivery is exactly right, and it’s the reason the ending hits as hard as it does.
A closing line can retroactively supply an interior the story never dramatized, and it’s a risky way to do it. It works here because the audience has been watching Wyatt notice things for an hour without comment.
The technique requires you to plant observation without conclusion. Show the character seeing, repeatedly, and say nothing about what he makes of it, and the reader will accept a late verdict as earned.
The failure mode is a final line that announces a theme nobody was living. If your last sentence explains the book, it’s a summary. If it changes what the book was, it’s an ending.
The Commune and the Diner
Two sequences make the film’s argument and they sit about twenty minutes apart.
The commune is a group of city people attempting to farm land they don’t understand, planting seed in dust, and the film is unsparing about it. These aren’t villains and they’re not going to survive the winter, and Wyatt says they’ll make it in a tone that makes clear he doesn’t believe it.
The diner is the other side. Local men at a counter making increasingly explicit remarks while the three travelers sit and wait, and nothing happens, and the scene ends with them leaving. The threat is entirely verbal and completely convincing. The two together are the film’s real subject. One group has withdrawn from the country and can’t feed itself, the other owns the country and will kill to keep it, and the travelers belong to neither.
The diner scene also used local people instead of actors in several roles, with the remarks reportedly improvised. That’s why the menace has a quality no written dialogue reproduces. Nobody in that room is performing contempt. It’s the scene in the film that scares me most, because nothing happens and I keep waiting for it to.
The Ending
Two men in a truck shoot Billy off his bike for no reason beyond irritation, then turn around and kill Wyatt when he rides back. The camera pulls up and away from a burning motorcycle on an empty road. It arrives with no build, no confrontation and no dialogue. The violence is casual and administrative, delivered by men who barely register what they’ve done.
That’s the genre’s most honest possible ending, and almost nothing since has been willing to repeat it. The road leads to a place where freedom isn’t available, and the trip is cut off before choice can complete it. The coldness is dead on, with no speech and no lesson, only a burning bike and a camera that doesn’t care.
The film also arrived at a moment that gave it more weight than it earned. Made for around four hundred thousand dollars, taking over sixty million, and released into a country that had just spent a year watching public figures killed on television.
Its commercial effect was larger than its artistic one. A cheap independent picture outgrossing studio productions convinced the industry that young directors working for very little were worth financing, and the decade of American filmmaking that followed is downstream of that conclusion more than of anything on screen here.
A journey doesn’t have to reach its destination. The interruption is sometimes the most complete statement the structure can make, because arriving would require the story to say what the arrival means. When you end violently, refuse the build. A confrontation gives the reader a shape to follow and makes the death feel like a consequence. Removing the build makes it feel like the world. That’s a different and colder statement. Consider what your ending forecloses. This one removes the possibility of the characters learning anything, and that removal is the argument the whole film was making.
Should you watch Easy Rider?
Yes, and accept that the middle sags. I’d rate it higher if Fonda and Hopper had been given characters to play instead of moods, because a lot around them is first-rate: the last four minutes, Nicholson’s campfire speech and a structure every road movie since has borrowed. The 7 is the distance between the film’s influence and the hour of riding I’d happily trim.
