Easy Rider is really a series of vignettes: some funny, some trippy, some dramatic, some downright scary.
The transitions between the vignettes follows main characters, Captain America (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper, who is also making his directorial debut) and whatever random person they've picked up along their sojourn, as they ride their motorcycles along the freeways of the American southwest and south.
The pretense is that they've just picked up a shit ton of cocaine, they're going to sell it, and they're going to retire somewhere.
This plot is a MacGuffin at best: the real story here is how two men that live in total freedom and independence are revered by the progressive and scorned by the regressive.
We open with the coke deal in Mexico (the notorious Phil Specter plays The Connection) and end in or around New Orleans at Mardi Gras. Along the journey, they go through a horse ranch -- where director Hopper shows a connection between the biker freaks of the 60's and the horse ranchers of yore; they pick up a drifter (Luke Askew) who takes them to a hippie commune; they get arrested in a small Southern town where they meet ACLU lawyer (and town drunk) George Hanson (Jack Nicholson in what could be my fave role that he's ever played); and they freak out on LSD with two hookers at Mardi Gras (played by Karen Black and Toni Basil - yes, that Toni Basil, who also gets a little bit of naked).
And, along the way, they encounter plenty of anti-freekz: country boys with sloping foreheads and under bites that do things like beat them with bats while they sleep, refuse lodging at 2nd rate motels, and do that thing that ends the journey (I won't spoil it).
Easy Rider, part of the Honorary Hopp-Along, is not a movie that would have been made three or four years earlier. In fact, I'm racking my brain to find a less plot-driven film pre-1970. Maybe The Trip, which has the same basic cast of characters, but even counter-culture films from that period followed an archetypal story structure.
Hopper's direction is flawless for this script and tone: his use of music, the jump cuts between scenes, the way he switches between 35MM and 16MM. The only other of his movies that I've seen is Colors, and that was when I was like 10, so I think I might have to run the 8 film D-Hopp director gamut.
Anyway, if you are a buff, and there are so many of us out there, Easy Rider is a wonderful example of freedom in filmmaking, and it is a must-watch.
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