Critics reviews

The picture's poignancy and even dread – it stayed with me this last viewing. With the lyrical cinematography by Laszlo Kovacs and Fonda's melancholic performance next to Hopper's brashness and dangerous goofiness, if you're in a certain mood (or, rather, if I am) you feel what Fonda might be feeling the entire movie, and you extend it onward, to today.

Hopper has a prodigious sense of imagistic flow—of the dreamy half-tranced revelry that a road trip can inspire. Much of Easy Rider is composed of scenes of Wyatt and Billy on their bikes, enjoying their periodic detachment from the American prejudices that governed the late 1960s as well as the 2010s. The movement of these scenes is intoxicating, glorious, with that glory heightened by the music of the Byrds, the Band, Steppenwolf, and many others.

With the feature rightfully reaching cult standing at a time when the label retained its meaning, Easy Rider takes the audience on a powerful, potent and perceptive ride through a lifestyle, a genre, and a new filmmaking discourse. As an examination of the former, Hopper and Fonda's creation is particularly promising, with few films before or since encapsulating the all-encompassing, independent mindset or rebellious yet idealistic opinions of the hippie generation.

Easy Rider also transcends its cultural moment, because it's about more than bikers and hippies or the tension between libertines and reactionaries. It's about the difficulty of escaping social conditioning and economic imperatives and sustaining a truly free life. Hopper, Fonda, and Southern don't merely validate a mythical image of life outside the mainstream. They show how tough it is to live that way.

The AIP biker-flick aesthetic, puffed up into mythical fatalism: Stoned campfire improv and fuschia-silhouette sunsets abound, along with "geeeeeet it?" forehead-slappers (cocaine sold at a junkyard, horseshoes equal motorcycle wheels). Despite it all, it's a valuable document of hepcat actors taking snapshots of America circa 1969 while shooting a pandering movie. László Kovács' cinematography keeps stretching space in the lyrical biking sequences, enthralled by the sheer size of the road.

Easy Rider is not just a significant American work, but it also stands as an exceptional example of an independent film, one where, with the push of youth and a desire for something different, a film rises above the establishment to reach a success all its own. Ambition, pertinence and a reasonable degree of skill combined to create a film, a very good one, that markedly stands as defining a generation, and a generation of American cinema.

A film important to and influential in the flower-power late '60s, Easy Rider now seems like a narcissistic hodgepodge of travelogue and passion play.

In Film Forum's crisp 35mm restoration, and its accompanying awesome period rock soundtrack, this Boomer relic has aged well. If you can perish thoughts of Albert Brooks in Lost in America and of Wilson and Stiller in Starsky & Hutch, there's more than an obnoxious generational statement here — there's also a black comedy about our ongoing Red v. Blue conflict.

Director Dennis Hopper borrows from the avant-garde to suggest the LSD experience, and some of the trips have a definite flavor of Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren. The film may be a relic now, but it is a fascinating souvenir—particularly in its narcissism and fatalism—of how the hippie movement thought of itself.

Dennis Hopper's lyrical, quirky film is better than pretty good in its handling of death, both the actual event and in the way the lead acting, like Ryan-Holden's in The Wild Bunch and Shirley Knight's in The Rain People, carries a scent of death... The finality and present-tense quality of the killings are remarkable: the beauty issues from the quiet, the damp green countryside, and a spectacular last shot zooming up from a curving road and burning cycle.

The movie displays an assortment of excellences that lift it above the run and ruck of its genre. First and foremost is the sterling performance of Jack Nicholson as George Hanson, a refreshingly civilized creature of Southern Comfort and interplanetary fantasies. Easy Rider comes to life with Nicholson's first hung-over entrance in a Deep South dungeon.