Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)

“The quintessential road movie.” — J. Hoberman

“This exciting existentialist road movie by Monte Hellman, with a sharp script by Rudolph Wurlitzer and Will Corry has my favorite Warren Oates performance and looks even better now than it did in 1971…The unsettling thing about this movie is that it starts off as a narrative but gradually grows into something much more abstract; that’s what’s beautiful about it as well.” — Jonathan Rosenbaum

SYNOPSIS

Standing at the unlikely intersection of Easy Rider and Robert Bresson, Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop had to wait decades for audiences to catch up with it. Eschewing conventional drama in favor of drift, silence, and open-road existentialism, the film follows two taciturn drag racers (musician James Taylor and Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys) and a drifting hitchhiker known only as the Girl (Laurie Bird) as they crisscross the American Southwest, challenged to a cross-country race by a compulsive raconteur played by Warren Oates. Stripped to its bare essentials and haunted by a profound sense of aimlessness, Hellman’s cult classic turns the road movie into a meditation on identity, alienation, and the fading promise of the American Dream. As the old saying goes, “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country.” Hellman’s masterpiece quietly asks what happens when there’s nowhere left to go.