The thesis of “Gasoline Rainbow,” the latest cinematic fantasia from the brothers Bill and Turner Ross, is articulated in its first moments, in voice-over set atop a sunset. “Sometimes when I look at night, I see that light over the hills, and I just wonder what it’s like … to be there,” a youthful voice says wistfully. The speaker wants to know if they’re alone in being who they are — a “weirdo,” as they put it. “I want to be out,” they continue. “I want to be myself, I want to be accepted. I want to be loved for who I am.”
Technically we’ve not yet met this person, but that doesn’t matter: We know them. The misfit outsider is a familiar character in movies and literature, and often possesses some wisdom that people trapped in the more conventional daily grind can’t see. There’s a tiny bit of the prophet in every outsider — and, of course, all prophets are outsiders.
“Gasoline Rainbow” is a technically fictional tale of five such misfits who get in a car and go on a journey toward the Pacific Coast. I say “technically,” because like much of the Rosses’ work, there’s not much separation between reality and make-believe. Their previous film, for instance, the 2020 sorta-documentary “Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets” sets up a scenario — the final night at a Vegas dive bar, on the eve of the 2016 presidential election — and populates it with real drinkers, who have a real rager on camera. But the bar itself wasn’t technically closing, it wasn’t in Vegas and these people weren’t regulars there. What, you might ask yourself, are you watching?
You are watching people figure out how to live at the end of the world, how to relate to one another and find joy in the middle of loss and uncertainty. Whether or not the scenario is staged, the human heart of it is absolutely real. “Gasoline Rainbow” is a little like “Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets,” in that the five teenagers at its center, playing versions of themselves, are looking for a “party at the end of the world” that they’ve heard about. But mostly they are there to be with one another, and it’s obvious their real personalities are part of the story.
The five travelers — Tony Aburto, Micah Bunch, Nichole Dukes, Nathaly Garcia, Makai Garza — are all friends in Wiley, Ore. (a town which, incidentally, doesn’t exist). They’re seeking “one last fun adventure we can all do together” before they have to return home and get real jobs. These are kids who didn’t like school and didn’t like home life. In another movie, they’d be delinquents running from the law.
But “Gasoline Rainbow” isn’t that movie. There’s an uncommon sweetness to this film, which is less about running away from something and more about discovering the road of life is littered with goodness, if you know where to look. There’s a loose, languorous quality to “Gasoline Rainbow,” which the Rosses shot using a mostly improvised format, a collaboration between actors and filmmakers. It feels like a home movie, or a documentary — a capture of a slice of life in which there’s no plot other than whatever happens on the road ahead.
That road is full of people who also feel like weirdos. There are burnouts and stoners who generously share tips and directions with the kids. There are skaters they chat with on the street who share their own stories and make sure the kids are safe and OK. Not every encounter is well and good — at one point, the tires on their van are stolen, leaving them to figure out how to keep going. But as viewers, we soon settle into the sense that these teenagers are going to be just fine.
Along the way they talk about what haunts them back home: soured relationships, preoccupied parents, loss, deportation, the general sense that life’s sameness is stifling. But almost everyone they encounter is older than them, and offers mentorship of one kind or another. At one point, before visiting some older family friends of one of the teens, another expresses worry about hanging out with “old people” who are “30 or 40.”
“Maybe they’re hippies,” another says. It’s a tiny window to the whole point of “Gasoline Rainbow,” which is this: Every generation has had its outsiders. There’s always been a group of people who didn’t feel like they really belonged. The lucky ones found one another and, decades later, are ready to pave over the bumps as best they can for those who are coming up behind. That’s the joy at the heart of this movie — the sense that for every square peg jammed into the wrong-shaped hole, there’s a whole bucket of similar shaped pegs waiting for them.
The teens do make it to the party at the end of the world, but, as you might predict, it’s not quite what they expected. It never had to be. The destination, as most of us discover eventually, is almost beside the point.
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