Easy Rider Reviews

Easy Rider is not quite a classic, but what it is is a great movie. It does start off slowly, but when it picks up the film has very few problems if any. The production values are excellent, the soundtrack is inspired, the script is very effective and Dennis Hopper's direction shows perfectly that he was as good a director as he was an actor. The story is also very compelling with a purposefully depressing ending(certainly a refreshing change from the somewhat clichéd riding into the sunset ending) and although the start is slow the pace is solid on the whole. The acting is faultless, the three leads Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson are superb and work wonderfully together.

All in all, Easy Rider is a fine movie, while just missing out on masterpiece status. What's for sure though, it is one of the best road movies there is. 9/10 Bethany Cox

I don’t mean this in a snide or mean-spirited way, in fact this isn’t a criticism at all, but Easy Rider is like an encapsulation of the late 60s counter-cultural movement played out in microcosm. A pure distillation of the concerns, thoughts, and bacchanal of that generation’s ennui played out across the road. What exactly are Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper looking for in Easy Rider? Who knows for certain, but what they find is a portrait of an American filled with rot and sickness.

Tangentially, Fonda and Hopper are trafficking drugs from Los Angeles to New Orleans, but the film takes many detours away from this main plot, dabbling in existentialism and an encroaching dread. It came out around the time of Woodstock, but something about Easy Rider’s minimalist dialog, wandering eye for scenery, and heavy use of destructive symbolize to telegraph the ending play like a warm-up for the destruction of the very movement it’s capturing.

I’m not entirely sure if Easy Rider plays today as living cinema the way a film like Bonnie & Clyde still does, or if it plays out as a moving historical diagram of the period. No matter, few films feel as authentically lived in and observed. Hopper and Fonda are rightly considered iconographic figureheads of the era and culture this film dictates, and that was before Easy Rider cemented them into the public consciousness as such. Once you add in New Hollywood mainstays like Karen Black and Jack Nicholson in some of their first major roles, then Easy Rider deserves its classic status tenfold.

Granted, not every segment in Rider is an absolute winner. An extended stay at a hippie commune is alternately banal and a strange sidetrack. Much better is when Jack Nicholson’s alcoholic lawyer appears, and everything congeals into a satisfying and coherent whole. He gives them the information about a brothel in New Orleans, which will come into play later as an acid trip with two hookers in a cemetery turns sour. We’ve been spiraling towards an unhappy ending throughout, and this sequence only solidifies that dark creeping feeling. Looking at it now, it’s as if Hopper and Fonda stared into their generations dreams, the American ideal that their parents fed them, and found only a destructive energy, an unstable force barely holding together several institutions that were ready to crumble at a moment’s notice. “We blew it, man.” What he meant then and how it plays now are two vastly different things.

Well, there were many things that led me to watch Easy Rider! The main reason was because only a couple of months ago, Dennis Hopper past away and this is supposed to have been his most famous film as a director and maybe even his most famous role as an actor. Also, it was Jack Nicholson's breakthrough film so just couldn't afford to miss this one! However, when I watched it I enjoyed it but I was expecting more so was a very slight disappointment to me. Referred by many as the "original road movie". Yeah, it is perhaps one of the first road films but it is quite far from the best one that I have seen.


Two counter-culture bikers set off from Los Angeles to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, meeting a cross-section of American characters en route. Like pretty much all road films: the stories are straight forward and predictable but some are unpredictable and take drastic twists and turns which is what I like best but unfortunately Easy Rider didn't really do that for me completely, I'm afraid. This was the first film I have seen with Peter Fonda in. His performance was good but I cannot see him being better in any film than how awesome his father Henry Fonda was. The late Dennis Hopper was brilliant too. Now, the main man and best actor of the film Jack Nicholson. No, Easy Rider wasn't his first feature film but it was the film that became a breakthrough for him in his career which lead to his first Academy Award nomination and rightly so!


Dennis Hopper's job as director was impressive despite starring in the film as well. Hopper himself had the original cut of the film at an estimated three hours in length. Upon reviewing it with some of the other key members of the production staff the length was cut down to its current length. Some of the film was shot on 16mm film instead of 35mm. This was demo footage shot a year before production began. Production of the film was incredible but the outcome of the film wasn't so amazing.


Overall, Easy Rider is an enjoyable classic that I thought could have been better.

Two counterculture bikers go cross country in search of American tradition. The adventure bridges the gap between the cultural shift from the 1960s to the 70s and portrays the harsh realities of American life and its segregation from one state to the next. Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper are a perfect on screen duo riding the highways to their ultimate demise.