Gasoline Rainbow: Ross Brothers’ road-movie is an ode to freewheeling teen pleasures

“Do you smoke?” Gasoline Rainbow’s characters put this question to several people they meet, and learn more than just who’s carrying. It’s a way to determine who’ll be good to get high with, crash with, maybe travel with as the film’s five teenage pals make their way hundreds of miles across Oregon toward the Pacific. The question often marks the beginning of the many new friendships depicted in Bill and Turner Ross’s ramshackle ode to the pleasures of being young and open to the world.

After meeting the patrons and proprietors of a soon-to-close Las Vegas dive bar in Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (2020), the Ross brothers return to the kind of youthful late-night wanderings that filled the quietly wondrous Tchoupitoulas (2012), which established their deceptively casual vein of docufiction. Again, they enlist non-professional actors to play versions of themselves in loosely scripted scenarios and more freewheeling sequences.

Its road-movie structure brings Gasoline Rainbow closer to a conventional drama – the Rosses have cited The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Easy Rider (1969) as models – and despite many digressions the film maintains a satisfactory forward momentum. The quest at hand is not without challenges, most seriously when the van’s tyres are stolen. Even this setback can’t diminish enthusiasm for a trip they see as their last chance for adventure before “we all have to get fucking jobs and shit”. Nor do these travellers ever seem wary of threatening spaces: a truck stop on a dark stretch of highway, a railyard where they hope to catch a ride prove to be remarkably hospitable.

With its scenes of grubby teens hanging out in skate parks – a scrappy sense of verisimilitude enhanced by brisk pacing and handheld camerawork – Gasoline Rainbow evokes the films Larry Clark and Harmony Korine made together and apart in the 1990s and 2000s. The key difference is the affection shown to nearly everyone on screen – not that the Rosses have a dubiously rosy view of their characters, who often talk of hardship. One speaks of the impact of her father’s deportation, another of caring for siblings because of his parents’ absence. Their friend laments his only option is to join the military if he hopes to make any kind of life for himself.

There’s something magical about the warmth, love and generosity the five express to one another, and radiate outward toward the others they encounter – and the film’s audience. Some viewers may wonder about the point of such an ambling, rambling exercise; others will be happy to catch the secondhand buzz.

 ► Gasoline Rainbow is currently available to stream on Mubi UK & Ireland.