Easy Rider

Director: Dennis Hopper

1969 / 95min / DCP

People around LA knew that inveterate photographer Hopper had a pretty good eye, but nobody expected his directorial debut to be the youthquake phenomenon that it was, a rolling tour of the American southwest with bikers Captain America and Billy (Peter Fonda and Hopper) that includes an LSD freak-out at a New Orleans cemetery with Black, a commune drop-in, and a star-making role for Jack Nicholson as a hick town lawyer. A pure expression of both the zeitgeist and Hopper’s own soured idealism, as summed up in Nicholson’s famous, pained statement: “This used to be a helluva good country.”