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There is so much going on in the multi-layered Easy Rider. For one thing, it doesn't glorify hippies. In fact, Hopper and Fonda are really just businessmen, out to make the big score. They're quintessentially American -- Fonda calls himself Captain America, and wears an American flag on his leather jacket, and has red, white and blue painted on his chopper's gas tank. These guys really just want to make money, not change society. If it were the 80's, they'd be selling computers. Also, some interesting symbolism -- Fonda puts the stash of money resulting from the drug sale in his gas tank -- in other words, money fuels the American dream.

This film is also an anti-Western. Instead of heading west, these guys head east. They pass through Monument Valley, site of many John Ford westerns. At an early point, they fix their choppers in a barn while a farmer fixes the horseshoes for his horse.

There is a structure to this seemingly freewheeling tale: the trip starts out idealistically. After they go to the commune, Fonda and Hopper skinny-dip with two hippie chicks in a bucolic, peaceful setting. The music is laid-back, the Byrds, the drug used is marijuana. It's an idealized example of "free love." Later, in New Orleans, our two heroes hook up with two prostitutes -- so much for free love. Fonda breaks down during an acid trip, and instead of music we hear the jarring sounds of an industrial, urbanized landscape -- geographically and symbolically far away from that Arizona commune.

This film doesn't glorify the hippie ethos -- in fact, it almost seems like a neo-conservative critique on the limitations of the hippie experience. Late in the film, Fonda tells Hopper, "We blew it," a line that prefigures the ultimate disillusionment that set in during the early 70's, when the Age of Aquarius gave way to Watergate, malaise, Reagan and rampant consumerism.

My friends and I went to see "Easy Rider" when we were in college. We sat around and commiserated about the fact that there was that Sword of Damocles, the Vietnam War, hanging over each of our heads. The anti-hero became the hero. Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper travelling across the country, scoring drugs, taking risks, trying to find America (the cliché of the time). They have some dalliances and some confrontations. They hook up with some pathetic women. Hopper is a hothead. Fonda full of wanderlust. Jack Nicholson as George come along for the ride because he has never seen anything like this before. The problem was a sickness that permeated everything at the time. As I've grown older, it has been easier to see weaknesses of these men. We were so angry about the conclusion and our parents say these guys got just what they deserved. That's what America was at that time. This movie made us think of the fragility of our lives in the hands of politicians and base individuals. See this again after all these years.

Two drifters, Wyatt "Captain America" (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) travel across the Southwestern and Southern United States with proceeds from a sale of cocaine to attend Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Louisiana encountering various characters along the way with the more countercultural persons welcoming of the two while traditionalist meet the two with contempt or sometimes violence.

Easy Rider is a 1969 road drama directed and co-written by Dennis Hopper who also stars in the film alongside co-writer and producer Peter Fonda. During the 1960s thanks to the success of AIP films such as The Wild Angels, this led to the creation of the subgenre of the Biker film. Both Fonda and Hopper had appeared in AIP produced Biker films as well as the Roger Corman directed LSD film The Trip (written by Jack Nicholson who'd end up with a prominent role in the film). While initially intended to be an AIP film the company wanted the option to replace Hopper if the film went over budget and rejecting that condition Fonda took the project to Columbia Pictures who backed the project. The film became a sleeper hit not only scoring solid critical reviews and earning Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for Jack Nicholson (in his mainstream breakout performance), but the film became a sizable financial success as the fourth highest grossing film that year and along with that year's Midnight Cowboy is credited with jumpstarting the New Hollywood era of 70s filmmaking. The historical value of Easy Rider is something to be admired, even if I feel the movie works better as a time capsule of its time better more than a movie.

In terms of its subject matter, Easy Rider from its opening is very loose in terms of structure and flow operating with a more avant garde approach that's less focused on story and more on experience. With a very documentary-like approach to the material Hopper for the first ten minutes or so doesn't even have any introduction to the characters of Wyatt and Billy and it feels very much like we're dropped into the middle of things with the two going about their business as the audience is along for the ride. There is a sense of character and history between the two with Wyatt being more sentimental and optimistic in comparison to Billy's more cynical outlook on the world and the two function as sounding boards for which the various vignettes to play off against. Hopper captures the beauty of the roads in the American Southwest and South as well as the contemporary social attitudes of both the counterculture and the traditionalists who react to the two with contempt at best or violence at worst.

Easy Rider is one of those movies where you can't dispute its historical and artistic value because without its influence it's a sure bet the landscape of film would be considerably different. While I found the film fascinating for capturing a portrait of a certain time and place in a cinema verite fashion, the film itself ultimately left me somewhat cold by the end. I think it is still worth a viewing however especially for its historical value both for its contributions to cinema as well as its portrait of 1960s America.

I expected it to be as dated and as much of a product of its time as it looked to be but-- nope. 50 years after its release Easy Rider is still as relevant as ever. It's a powerful and uncompromising depiction of America's culture war that doesn't portend to have any good guys, much less answers, as it follows three guys (played by stars Fonda, Hopper, and Nicholson) who are biking cross country and engaged in the use and spread of drugs. But still, the divide is real. Just as real today as it is today. Free love, Individual liberty and maybe a little bit of decadence on one side-- bigotry, closed mindedness, and hatred on the other. I won't spoil what happens as it really should be seen. A really powerful film.

I cannot overstate the importance of this movie in my personal development.

In 1969 I was eighteen and a freshman at Cambridge University. I was also a near-fundamentalist and a member of the Christian Union. Its officials decreed that Easy Rider was unsuitable for Christian viewing; I'd seen some enthusiastic reviews which made me curious. Moral and spiritual dilemma followed. To view or not to view? I prayed about it - look, this is a long time ago, right - and decided that if it had been OK for the Christian Union's leaders to see it, if only to realise it was morally dubious, then it was OK for me. They hadn't been corrupted, presumably; the Lord would see that I wasn't either.

So I went and it blew me away. I thought then and think now, that this is a magnificently perceptive commentary on hippie culture and one that only the medium of film can deliver. Naive idealism is weighed against the squalid reality of drugs (and indeed alcohol). Freedom is portrayed as often aimless, self-indulgent and downright boring. The underlying morality could be seen as puritanical: a celebration of the free-lovin' drop-out Sixties it ain't, more a weary end-of-decade critique thereof. I would have thought there was much to commend it to the Christian Union moralisers, yet as ever they couldn't see past the surface - drug abuse, loose women. Yet it has its high moments, in more ways than one, and is always a treat for the eyes.

My decision to defy the Christian Union by seeing the film was an early step out of my fundamentalist prison and I haven't stopped walking yet. No-one's ever going to tell me what I can and can't watch again: nor will I censor anyone else's viewing. I'm still a believer, but not of the kind that the Christian Union would have thought will ever go to heaven. Guess I'll have to live with that.