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 are 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 whole thing was assembled from an enormous quantity of footage by people who were not certain what they had.
What it gets right is the ending, which 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 is 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, which gives the riding sequences a documentary quality the studio pictures of the period could not produce. The road looks like a road instead of like a set.
The music is the other structural innovation and it is 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, which is 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 is a question the film keeps asking in different ways, which is 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, which is why they accumulate instead of merely occurring.
If your episodes are interchangeable in order, you have written a sequence instead of a structure, and readers feel the arbitrariness even when they cannot 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 is 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 is 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.
That speech is delivered by a man who will be dead before morning, which is the film’s construction at its sharpest. The argument is stated by the person about to be killed for demonstrating it.
Nicholson was not the first choice and took the part late, and the performance made his career after a decade of low-budget work. What he brings that the film desperately needed is enjoyment. Hanson is delighted to be on the road, delighted to be drinking, delighted by his own theory about aliens, and the delight is the only warmth in the picture.
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, which is 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 have not 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 does not understand, and the film declines to explain. Two words that reframe the entire journey, delivered by a character who has said almost nothing for ninety minutes.
A closing line can retroactively supply an interior the story never dramatized, and it is 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 is a summary. If it changes what the book was, it is an ending.
The Commune and the Diner
Two sequences carry the film’s argument and they sit about twenty minutes apart.
The commune is a group of city people attempting to farm land they do not understand, planting seed in dust, and the film is quietly unsparing about it. These are not villains and they are not going to survive the winter, and Wyatt says they will make it in a tone that makes clear he does not 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 cannot 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, which is why the menace has a quality no written dialogue reproduces. Nobody in that room is performing contempt.
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, which is the point. The violence is casual and administrative, delivered by men who barely register what they have done.
That is the genre’s most honest possible ending and almost nothing since has been willing to repeat it. The road does not lead to freedom, it leads to the place where freedom is not available, and the journey is interrupted before choice can complete it.
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 does not 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, which is 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. This is a film with a great last four minutes, a great supporting performance and a structure that every road movie since has borrowed, wrapped around two leads who were never fully written and a middle hour that is mostly riding.
Frequently Asked Questions
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