Wyatt and Billy, on the other hand, simply need to keep moving in order to evade the conservatism of the society that’s already been built around them. In that film, it’s the barbed wire and fences that divide up the land and constrict him that are the enemy. Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper), and their rejection of conformity, recall Kirk Douglas’s cattle herder in 1955’s Man Without a Star. There are countless films from the ’50s about cowboys running from the advancing civilised society. That search for freedom was nothing new in the western genre, though.

And the cowboys are now drug-dealing hippy types, hell-bent on finding freedom within the confines of the US. The horses are, of course, replaced by motorcycles. But in truth the film feels more like a western inflected with the European arthouse tendencies of the time. The director’s conclusions are anything but positive.Įasy Rider followed a spate of low-budget biker movies made in the ’50s and ’60s in America, many of them starring Hopper. This is a film about the ’60s and what the end of that decade meant going forward. But at the same time, the film is very much of its time. It’s not hard to see why the release of Dennis Hopper’s film, about the volatility and polarity of American society, seems as prescient today as it was at the end of the 1960s. Few are as biting, inventive, and also endlessly relevant as Easy Rider. There have been many American movies specifically concerned with the country itself.

Easy rider actors 1969