Easy Rider

Two anti-establishment bikers (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper) set out on a cross-country trip to Mardi Gras after completing a drug deal.

Much of Easy Rider doesn’t age well. The counter-culture rhetoric, the fashions, the hippie commune, all seem alien to generations that didn’t live through them. In fact, the whole film has a certain disconnected feeling until Jack Nicholson’s character shows up. Then the film really picks up.

Unlike leads Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, who are true outsiders, Nicholson’s alcoholic lawyer George Hanson is an everyman relatable to viewers even today. He’s the outsider in Fonda and Hopper’s character’s world.

Easy Rider doesn’t have much of a story, really. Fonda and Hopper do a drug deal and score some cash, and then take off for Mardi Gras. That’s about the extent of it. Much of the film revolves around imagery and symbolism, but out of the 1960s context, a lot of it fails to resonate.

While the film’s central themes—the persecution of outsiders and the meaning of the American dream—still resonate, the way they’re presented is tied so inextricably to 1969, that Easy Rider is regulated to antique status, appreciated best by those who saw it when it was new.