Easy Rider (1969) - film review

Wyatt and Billy are a pair of drug-dealing bikers whose outlandish appearance and easy lifestyle reflect their yearning for freedom.  Rich from their latest cocaine delivery, they decide to ride east to New Orleans, to attend the Mardi Gras celebrations.   On the way, they pick up a hitchhiker and spend time with a hippie commune.  The hippie life appeals to neither Wyatt and Billy and so the two men resume their journey.   When they join in a street parade in a respectable little town, they are thrown into jail for parading without a permit.  Here, they meet George Hanson, a civil rights lawyer who was arrested for heavy drinking.  George arranges for his new friends to be released and decides to join them on their trip to New Orleans.  Passing through another town, the three men draw the attention of some local roughnecks, who viciously attack them one evening.  This is turning out to be one Hell of a journey, but will Billy and Wyatt ever find what they are looking for...?

Along with Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967), Easy Rider is one of a handful of films which sparked a revolution in Hollywood and led to the birth of the counterculture in American filmmaking in the late sixties, early seventies.  A decade after the start of the French New Wave, American cinema was about to experience its own seismic renewal.  This film is as much a valuable social record of its era as an inspired piece of filmmaking.  Made on a budget of less than 400 thousand dollars, it was a phenomenal success, taking over sixty million dollars at the box office worldwide, and won an award at Cannes for its director, Dennis Hopper (his first and best film).  This is also the film that put Jack Nicholson on the map, his Oscar nomination helping to establish him as one of Hollywood’s rising stars.

Today, Easy Rider feels self-consciously arty and uncomfortably self-pitying, but when it hit cinema screens in 1969 it caught the zeitgeist more than any film of its time, reflecting and motivating a youth rebellion that began the previous year, in the turbulent spring of 1968.   And America’s youth had a great deal to rebel against.  The political system had been shown to be corrupt and self-serving.  Technological and industrial progress was ruining the planet.  There was the seemingly interminable war in Vietnam, which many now believed was purely for dubious, profit-related motives.  Meanwhile, the Soviets and the Americans were busy building up their arsenals of nuclear weapons to ensure that when the human race went, it went with a bang.  It is widely accepted that the 1960s were defined by the sexual revolution, the start of true female emancipation.  An equally significant revolution erupted towards the end of the decade, brought about by youngsters who believed they were born to be wild.

There is a wonderful irony in Easy Rider.  Whilst the film wholeheartedly invites youngsters to rebel and seize freedom where they can, it also makes it quite clear that such freedom does not exist.  Even the illusion of freedom, bought by hard drugs, heavy drinking and free love, is ultimately unsatisfying.  The optimism with which the decade had begun was all but spent by the time this film was in circulation, so its depressing, almost nihilistic conclusion, was pretty well how most adolescents saw their own future.  Rebellion may be a pointless gesture but, for many, it was the best alternative to conformity or suicide.

Easy Rider is often credited as cinema’s first road movie and it broke new ground with its soundtrack, which includes hits from The Band, The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Steppenwolf, making it a nostalgia piece as much as anything else.  Other innovations include long tracking shots through the wild American landscape (haunting images that contribute much to the film’s elegance and raw poetry) and a remarkable acid montage sequence which effectively emulates the experience of a drugs trip.  Fonda, Hopper and Nicholson are all at their best here and are well-served by Hopper’s naturalistic and, at times, devastatingly profound dialogue.  Now stripped of much of its social relevance, Easy Rider still manages to provide a memorable viewing experience and, yeah man, it deserves its status as a classic of American cinema.

© Chris Alderton 2010

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