Early on in The Straight Story, the 1999 drama that David Lynch called his “most experimental film,” a doctor tells 73-year-old Alvin Straight that he likely has emphysema and that if he doesn’t make some lifestyle changes, there will be consequences. In the next shot, Alvin, played by Richard Farnsworth, lights up a Swisher Sweet and puffs away with satisfaction.
David Lynch, too, loved smoking—the message he posted in August announcing his own emphysema was an ode to the pleasures of tobacco, “lighting cigarettes on fire, smoking them.” Lynch died Thursday, a week after being evacuated from his home in the Hollywood Hills in the midst of the Los Angeles wildfires. He was 78, and his love of smoking was not the only thing he shared with Alvin Straight. The Straight Story might seem like a minor film in Lynch’s oeuvre—in the wake of the director’s death, it’s Blue Velvet, Mulholland Dr., and the many iterations of Twin Peaks that Lynch lovers keep returning to—but in its departures from his usual tone it’s a striking entry point into his work, a modest masterpiece that reveals more each time you watch it.
Based on the true story of an elderly Iowan who drove his riding lawn mower across the Mississippi to visit his ailing brother, The Straight Story is a leisurely road movie touching on familiar Lynchian themes of regret, experience, and fate. The script, written by Lynch’s longtime partner Mary Sweeney with John Roach, puts Straight, puttering across the plains on his John Deere, in conversation with a collection of loners and kind souls. (In his trailer, Alvin keeps two folding chairs—one for him, and one just in case someone wants to stop by his campfire and chat.) In The Straight Story, as in many other Lynch stories, rural America is full of weirdos, but here they’re quieter, sadder, and more endearing—not nitrous-sucking murderers but a desperate woman who can’t stop hitting deer with her car, or bickering twin mechanics played by Chris Farley’s younger brothers.
Lynch took The Straight Story to 1999’s Cannes film festival, where in perhaps the greatest year ever for American independent film, he sold his movie to Disney. (It’s still streaming on Disney+.) He laughed, later, when it received a G rating from the MPAA—surely that would never happen again, he cracked. Yet he was obviously fond of this placid film. “I felt its yearning for pure, intense feeling represented something that was in the air,” he said. “I don’t know whether what’s in the air is also a desire to have a break from sex and violence or, rather, a yearning for more tender, more direct storytelling.”
The movie’s most tender, direct scene is a campfire interaction between Alvin and a young runaway, played by Anastasia Webb, who’s certain her family hates her, and will hate her even more when they find out she’s pregnant. When his kids were little, Alvin tells her, he would give each of them a stick and tell them to break it. Then he’d tell them to tie all the sticks together and try to break them. “That’s family,” he says, that unbreakable bundle of sticks. Critics at the time took issue with the scene for its alleged pro-life undertones, but watching it now, it feels not conservative but mournful, the declaration of a man who, after all, is traveling hundreds of miles on a lawn mower to apologize to his estranged brother before they both die.
Because above all, The Straight Story is a movie about mortality, about a man facing the end of his life with thoughtfulness and dignity. Lynch shot the film in sequence in the fall along the Iowa roads the real Alvin Straight rode, and as the movie goes on, the trees glow orange with autumn, and Farnsworth, the sturdy character actor given a lead, gets ever more haggard and exhausted. Farnsworth was dying of cancer when he took the role—he isn’t feigning Alvin Straight’s leg paralysis, his need for two canes to get around. Yet he carries the movie, embracing Alvin’s crankiness but also his tenderness towards his daughter (Sissy Spacek), the strangers he encounters, and even the long, straight Midwestern roads he putters along at 5 mph. Lynch found the journey they went on together unusually moving. “In the editing room I cried like mad,” he said.
We know, through the entire film, that Alvin Straight, despite every hardship he endures, must make it to Wisconsin, must arrive at the home of his brother Lyle. What we don’t know is what will happen when he gets there. When the movie’s end arrives, it’s a scene of cosmic beauty, accompanied by Angelo Badalamenti’s ethereal score—pure cinematic liftoff, a triumph of writing, direction, acting, casting, all the things that make a movie take flight. It’s also bittersweet. How could it not be, with its iconoclastic hero finishing his long journey, his failing body framed by the wide-open American sky?
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