87/100Analyzing this film feels wrong, somehow. Its greatness lies in how much it strips away: conventional performances (apart from Oates, who serves as garrulous counterpoint to Taylor and Wilson's superlative blankness), narrative payoffs (where are the tortured Internet debates about who gets the pinks?), establishing shots, etc. What remains is as pure as Americana gets—a road movie that's genuinely, as its title declares, about the actual road. My sole reservation is the way it treats The Girl as chattel for the men, which not only reeks of unthinking sexism but belatedly introduces real conflict (via Taylor's sudden fixation with her) in a film that had been doggedly and deftly sidestepping it up to that point. But that's only a minor speedbump, offset by gorgeously uninflected shots of Taylor and Wilson silently eating lunch in a truck-stop diner; Oates leaning pensively against a Coke dispenser while chugging a bottle; a random family stopping at the site of an accident and jogging toward the wreckage in alarm, whereupon Hellman cuts to G.T.O picking up his next hitchhiker, never to return. Very hard to articulate the things I love about this one. They seem banal when you describe them, but they thrum on the screen.
