Gasoline Rainbow

Anywhere’s got to be better than here. That’s the simple motivation for the road trip of Gasoline Rainbow, a new addition to the semi-improvised “kids on a road trip” genre by the directors of Bloody Noses, Empty Pockets.

The Ross Bros, Bill IV and Turner, made their reputation as experimental documentarians, but stepped into drama in 2020 with their portrait of a day in a Las Vegas dive bar. It felt like another slice of reality but was deliberately constructed to be so, with an auditioned coterie of regulars. Yet in its grime and soaked beer mats, there was a sense of authenticity – lightning captured in a half-empty bottle – and also innovation, that we’d never seen this kind of environment captured in this fashion.

The same can’t really be said of Gasoline Rainbow, because it feels like the youth has been aimlessly traversing a mythical America ever since Wyatt and Billy took off on their Harleys. The form gathered momentum in 2016 with American Honey, which seeded first-timers with name actors like Shia LaBeouf and Riley Keough, and most recently there’s been been Austin filmmaker Katherine Propper’s Lost Soulz, which swirled together formalist influences with an observational, over-the-shoulder way of capturing the performances. Like Gasoline Rainbow, Propper had her performers play effectively themselves in a mixture of situations that were either stumbled into or extrapolated upon.

There is, of course, an underlying structure. The one the Rosses give the five protagonists, high school graduates from the fictional Wiley in rural Oregon, is a road trip to see the ocean. They are, in the kindest senses of the term, teenage fuckups, all sense of potential in their world knocked out of them by domestic abuse, absentee parents, racism, addiction. If you asked what they were running from, the answer could only be “what have you got?”

What they do have is community, their haphazard little accreted family that has been together for so long that it’s hard to see the joins. And community is where the Rosses excel, from their breakout portrayal of their Ohio birthplace in 2009’s 45365 to the dreamlike exploration of their adopted home of New Orleans in 2012’s Tchoupitoulas, and, of course, Bloody Nose, Empty Pickets. If there’s a road marker for Gasoline Rainbow in their earlier work, it is indeed Tchoupitoulas, in which three young brothers spend one night wandering through the French Quarter, their personalities revealed by their interactions with and responses to the changing scene. The Rosses achieve the same effect by having the quintet head out into the summer – first by beaten-up van, then riding the rails, on foot, even boat – to reach the party at the end of the world. They put Blanche DuBois to shame by their willingness to rely on the kindness of strangers, and for the most part it works out, as they come briefly under the wings of a succession of crusty punks, burnouts, skaters, and partiers, all of whom seem glad to find and nurture fellow spirits.

The underlying question around which they all dance is whether they – partially, individually, or together – will return to Wiley after this exploration of a certain strata of America, one for which the Rosses have a particular and abiding affection. It’s real and raw, and the captured conversations among the travelers and with the people they meet has a certain veracity. But at the same time, there’s a certain artificiality: inevitable in the filmmaking process, but it leads to a strange sanitization (the idea that most of their generous hosts and guides seem more likely to offer them Froot Loops than a blunt stretches credulity). The determination to make every conversation about either nothing or something leaves them all laden with meaning and Gen Z angst. There never seems space for simply teen blather, like the boys’ conversations about hot dogs and bear attacks in Tchoupitoulas. Nor is there room for that film’s diversions, where it felt like one Ross would stay with the boys and the other would wander off to examine what they’re seeing. This time, it’s hard not to feel their hands as directors, just outside of frame and on the steering wheel. In a drama that depends on its organic structure, the constructed nature is a little too visible under the skin.