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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.
