If Turner Classic Movies is right, if there really is a list of "The Essentials" – the movies everyone ought to see – then somewhere on that list resides 1969's legendary Easy Rider. Whether one likes the film or not, whether one believes that it speaks well or poorly of the counterculture, whether or not one condones or condemns the characters in the film, it is a movie which helped change the filmic landscape.
Directed by Dennis Hopper and produced by Peter Fonda (they also co-wrote the script along with Terry Southern), the film stars the two men as Wyatt (Fonda) and Billy (Hopper). After making a big drug deal at the start of the film, the two end up buying some motorcycles, they stash their extra cash in one of the fuel tanks, and decide to drive from the Southwest to the South and go to Mardi Gras.
By all definitions, the film is a classic road movie. Virtually the entirety of the film takes place during this journey and is about the two men as they head off to find freedom. Along their way, Wyatt and Billy do drugs, meet a rancher, do more drugs, visit a hippie commune, do drugs, get arrested and meet an ACLU lawyer (Jack Nicholson), do drugs, get run out a small Louisiana town, do drugs, etc.
Made for a small budget and outside the unraveling Hollywood system, Easy Rider is the product of a very specific moment in American society. It helped cement the movement Peter Biskind recounts in the seminal Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'N' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood.
It is all-too-easy in a review of Easy Rider to veer off the film itself and end up writing a far more academic paper on the film's place in Hollywood cinema of the 1970s, how it affected the Hollywood system, and how it affected the culture at large. It is because these areas are so ripe for discussion that the film makes the list of movies everyone who likes movies (and quite possibly everyone in general) ought to see. And, one's opinions on the characters and plot of the film probably speak as much to that person's mindset as they do to the film itself, perhaps more.
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