The American Dreamer

This movie is worth seeing only if you have a hankering to watch Dennis Hopper wander around smoking joints and or hand rolled cigarettes and spewing retarded hippie philosophy for two hours. This film is horrible. The only interesting and or funny parts are definitely unintentional. Hopper's rambling, near incoherent and clichéd dissertations on life, God, the mind, sexuality and more are extremely nonsensical and make him sound half mad or whole stupid most of the time. Hopper is trying way too hard to create an outlaw mythos for himself and it shows. On top of the false machismo, his attitude reeks of ego mania, or just plain mania. Definitely worth seeing for Hopper fans so they can see what a dirt-bag he was back then. Hopper has stated numerous times that he is very embarrassed about his shenanigans in the 70s, and I'm embarrassed for him. 1/10.

This documentary film about Dennis Hopper really impressed me back in 1971, when I saw it at U. of Penn. It was released on college campuses per Hopper's wishes as part of a plan to change film distribution patterns which, alas, failed, and I haven't heard of it being revived since. The premise was to show Hopper at his Taos, New Mexico headquarters editing his epic "The Last Movie". Along the way his pal and documentarist L.M. (Kit) Carson revealed a lot about Dennis, including his fondness for dallying with young groupies, occasionally right-wing views mixed in with a generally liberal philosophy (particularly regarding gun ownership), etc. The most fascinating segments show clips from "The Last Movie" and Hopper in the editing room musing over the filmmaking process. Later, when the finished "The Last Movie" was released and flopped miserably, thereby curtailing Hopper's budding career as a director (see "Easy Rider"), this documentary took on added meaning in revealing those excesses that contributed to his Wellesian implosion.

The American Dreamer (1971)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

Who doesn't love Dennis Hopper? He was certainly one of the most interesting actors of his generation and after EASY RIDER he pretty much had an open pass to make whatever he wanted. That film turned out to be THE LAST MOVIE and its critical and financial hardships pretty much ended Hopper's rising directing career. This documentary was filmed as he was editing that movie.

A few days before watching this, I sat down with THE LAST MOVIE for the first time and I stated that Hopper, a known alcoholic and drug user, must have been on some pretty good stuff while shooting the movie. After seeing this I'm really not so sure. It's clear that he's high on something but at the same time he speaks fairly well and he certainly has no problem getting his thoughts out on screen. It makes you wonder why THE LAST MOVIE turned out so bad but that isn't really covered here.

What this documentary is basically doing is shining a spotlight on Hopper who was still on a wave of success after EASY RIDER. I think it was rather fascinating seeing him here because at the time all of this was shot no one had the slightest idea that the film in question would turn out so poorly. What is on display here is simply the actor talking about a variety of subjects including life, movies, why people should be forced to watch movies they don't want to and the same that Orson Wells can't get enough people to want to watch his movies.

There's also a lot of sexual talk throughout the picture including some images of Hopper in a bathtub with a couple ladies. At one point Hopper refers to himself as a lesbian and explains why. There's a lot of frank discussion on sex, nudity on the screen and so much more. Obviously Hopper was a fan of sex as that takes up a great deal of the running time.

Calling this a documentary gives the whole genre a bad name. So overwhelming was the success of Easy Rider that they thought it was enough for a feature film to send out a camera team to follow Denis Hopper around for a few days and record his incoherent and rather boring ramblings. No script, no idea, no plan, nothing to say at all. I kinda liked him up until now but here her comes across a vain and self centered nitwit. It makes you really happy that those hippie days are over.

One of the many low points in this home movie is, when beard stroking and chain smoking Hopper muses on the fact that he rather gives good head then f*** a beautiful woman and you sense that he is quite pleased with himself for being such a modern man. Sadly enough he destroys the overall effect when he asked his female sidekick if she considers this weird, and instead of letting her reply cuts her short and rambles on about himself being a Lesbian. So much for his respect towards women. I wish I could quote some of Hopper's platitudes to prove how boring and silly they are but as they are all so unmemorable, I can't recall any. Did I mention the horrible soundtrack? Kinda drawing by numbers Hippie Folk Music that makes you wanna smash the acoustic guitar over the singers head after the first few lines. Did I mention the nudity? Well if you have any desire to witness you hippie parents pretending to have fun with a threesome snog feast in the bathtub, you gonna have a field day here. Anyone else, stay clear.

This warts-and-all documentary of Dennis Hopper at home in Taos, New Mexico, in the period after the filming but before the release of his amazing THE LAST MOVIE, provides a fascinating window into a world that is forever gone and probably only lasted for a short time: the period when the sixties were over but we were still running on fumes from the sixties and things had not yet crashed and burned. This was a year when you could go see a film like VANISHING POINT at a mainstream movie theater and when THE LAST MOVIE was released by a major studio. I was an adolescent at that time and can testify that Hopper represented a heroic image to many of us back then. I never got to see this film at the time because it did not get much distribution. How interesting to see it thirty-three years later. Hopper raises so many interesting questions and issues in THE American DREAMER, but rambler and dreamer that he is, he moves on without stopping to analyze or apply any of it. Perhaps Mr. Hopper expected US to make the next move fueled by the ideas he threw us. The film itself shows Hopper at home editing what would become THE LAST MOVIE, pontificating on all kinds of subjects regarding the arts, society, sex, drugs,his own legacy, and life in general. Intercut with this is footage of Hopper taking his clothes off on the street in a residential neighborhood, shooting various guns, talking with representatives from Universal about THE LAST MOVIE, walking around. Voice-overs of Hopper thinking aloud are played during these scenes. The music is an assemblage of vaguely philosophical stoner folk that perfectly reflects the atmosphere. Hopper talks about honesty in film, and he certainly lives by his own ideology as this is one of the least flattering artist-approved film biographies I've ever seen. Bob Dylan's DON'T LOOK BACK and Woody Allen's WILD MAN BLUES are the only other films about well-known celebrities I'd include on the same shelf. If Mr. Hopper owns the rights to this, he should definitely release it on DVD. By the way, I mentioned earlier about the sixties crashing and burning (as symbolized in the final scene of VANISHING POINT). The film that for me documents the final nail in the coffin of the sixties spirit is WONDERLAND.