Film Review: Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)

The New Hollywood era of the late 1960s and early 1970s remains a mythologised chapter in American cinema, a fleeting moment when studios granted directors unprecedented creative freedom, resulting in audacious, boundary-pushing films. While this period birthed enduring masterpieces—The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Chinatown—it also produced curious experiments that, for all their ambition, failed to resonate beyond niche audiences. Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) epitomises this divide. Hailed by critics as a minimalist triumph and later enshrined as a cult classic, the film’s reputation belies its fundamental shortcomings: a glacial pace, underdeveloped characters, and a self-conscious detachment that borders on tedium. A road movie stripped of momentum, it captures the existential angst of its era but forgets to engage its audience along the way.

Rudy Wurlitzer’s screenplay reduces narrative to its barest bones. The plot orbits two nameless gearheads—The Driver (James Taylor) and The Mechanic (Dennis Wilson)—whose lives revolve around a souped-up 1955 Chevrolet 150. Drifting across America, they fund their rootless existence through drag races, their world defined by engine grease and asphalt. In Flagstaff, they pick up The Girl (Laurie Bird), a hitchhiker offering sex as currency for a ride east. Later, in New Mexico, they encounter a middle-aged man, GTO (Warren Oates), driving a gleaming Pontiac GTO. A rivalry sparks, culminating in a cross-country race to Washington, D.C., with ownership of the cars as the stakes. Yet the race itself becomes an afterthought, abandoned as the characters meander through diners, motels, and highways, their journey devolving into a series of anticlimactic encounters.

Wurlitzer’s script leans into New Hollywood’s fascination with alienation, but its minimalism verges on inertia. The Driver and Mechanic communicate in terse, functional exchanges about carburettors and fuel ratios, their personalities as blank as their monikers. The Girl exists as a cipher, her motivations—beyond a vague desire to reach the East Coast—never explored. Only GTO, with his peacocking blazers and tall tales, hints at interiority, though his backstory remains frustratingly opaque. The film’s refusal to contextualise its characters—no families, no pasts, no futures—might aim for universality but instead renders them hollow, their existential drift feeling less profound than undercooked.

Two-Lane Blacktop occupies an awkward space between genre expectations and arthouse pretension. On paper, it aligns with the era’s iconic road films—Easy Rider, Vanishing Point—yet Hellman pointedly rejects their kinetic energy. Drag races, the film’s nominal hook, are staged with perfunctory indifference: no roaring engines, no adrenalised editing, no visceral thrill. The climactic cross-country race disintegrates almost immediately, the characters detouring into side quests (repairing engines, picking up hitchhikers) that deaden any narrative tension. Even the soundtrack, a hallmark of New Hollywood’s populist appeal, is conspicuously sparse. Kris Kristofferson’s raspy rendition of “Me and Bobby McGee” briefly injects warmth, but Hellman otherwise avoids diegetic music, leaving the film’s silences to drown in engine noise and wind.

This austerity might have worked with a stronger cast. Instead, Hellman’s decision to cast non-actors—musicians Taylor and Wilson, plus his then-girlfriend Bird—proves disastrous. Taylor and Wilson deliver lines with the enthusiasm of sleepwalkers, their lack of chemistry muting the camaraderie central to their characters. Bird, meanwhile, struggles to convey even basic emotional beats, her performance limited to vacant stares and monotone delivery. Only Warren Oates salvages the film. As GTO, he layers pathos beneath the character’s bravado, his tall tales to hitchhikers—claiming to be a test pilot, a retired astronaut—hinting at a man constructing identity from scraps. In a fleeting but memorable cameo, Harry Dean Stanton electrifies the screen as a gay hitchhiker ejected from GTO’s car, his raw vulnerability underscoring the film’s missed potential.

Wurlitzer’s script gestures toward the era’s cultural fissures. The characters’ insistence they “aren’t hippies”—trimming their hair, avoiding overt displays of counterculture—reflects a post-Easy Rider wariness of rural America’s hostility. Yet these threads fray under Hellman’s direction. A scene where The Driver nervously assures a gas station attendant they’re “just passing through” could have mined tension from the period’s urban-rural divide. Instead, it fizzles into another static exchange, emblematic of the film’s reluctance to engage with its own themes.

Hellman’s stylistic choices further alienate. The much-discussed finale—a celluloid meltdown mimicking the film’s destruction in a projector—feels less like a bold statement on impermanence than a student-film gimmick. It encapsulates the film’s fatal flaw: prioritising abstract concepts over human connection. Where Easy Rider used its nihilistic ending to critique America’s shattered idealism, Two-Lane Blacktop’s metatextual trickery rings hollow, a pretentious flourish in search of profundity.

To dismiss Two-Lane Blacktop entirely would be unfair. Cinematographers Gregory Sandor and Jack Deerson craft striking compositions of America’s fading highways, their lens capturing a nation in transition. Scenes of desolate motels, sun-bleached diners, and crumbling asphalt evoke a pre-Interstate nostalgia, preserving a landscape soon to be homogenised by modernity. These moments, though sparse, suggest a more compelling film lurking beneath the inertia.

Yet for most viewers, the film remains an endurance test. Contemporary audiences, accustomed to tighter pacing and richer characterisation, will find its languor baffling. Even by 1971 standards, it flopped commercially, dismissed as “tedious” and “emotionally frigid” by mainstream critics. Its cult status today rests largely on contrarian reappraisals and its proximity to the New Hollywood canon. But canonisation requires more than historical curiosity; it demands artistry that transcends its era. Two-Lane Blacktop, for all its atmospheric visuals and Oates’ valiant efforts, remains a relic—a road to nowhere, paved with unmet ambition.

RATING: 4/10 (+)

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