How New-Aged Road Films Make Sense of Modern America

The American road film was once a genre synonymous with liberation and boundless horizons. From Easy Rider to Thelma & Louise, the open highway served as metaphor for freedom, rebellion, and self-actualization. Yet by nature, the road film is not static. This is a genre that is constantly evolving, in motion, always adapting to the times. The vastness of the American landscape, once mythologized as the stage for self-discovery and adventure, has become something different: a mirror of emotional and cultural instability.

Where the road film once promised freedom, it now reveals fracture. Now, our endless space is the backdrop for something more sinister, strange, or surreal, a desolate landscape of lost, questioning people wandering through lost towns. These new-age road films reflect an uncertain America.

Contemporary road films no longer follow characters sprinting toward liberation but instead portray wanderers adrift in liminal zones, fractured towns, abandoned highways, motel rooms flickering with static light. They echo the subculture of urban explorers who trespass through uncanny spaces, deserted malls, and decaying amusement parks, documenting America’s dark underbellies. The road film itself has begun to resemble these landscapes: a vehicle assembled from disjointed parts, a collage of instability and longing.

Classic road films mythologized rebellion and escape. Today’s road films demythologize. They drift, unravel, destabilize. Rather than finding themselves, characters often lose themselves. The road endures, but its meaning will continue to invert and subvert expectation, exposing the estrangement and dislocation of modern American life.

In Sean Price Williams’ The Sweet East (2023), the road carries Lillian through a kaleidoscope of fragments, from anarchists to extremists to academics, none of which offer stable identity. Her journey feels like flipping through channels on a broken television, each stop reflecting a culture fractured into absurd, incompatible pieces. It is a surreal drift through a broken America.

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The film begins conventionally enough, Talia Ryder as Lillian, a high school senior from South Carolina, with her classmates on a trip to Washington, D.C. After a violent conspiracy-fueled shooting at a restaurant, she is swept away from the ordinary structure of her life and into a bizarre sequence of encounters. Rescued by Caleb, an anarchist filmmaker and activist, she briefly becomes a symbol in a protest movement before slipping away again, drifting almost passively into the orbit of a far-right professor who treats her as his prodigy. Later, she wanders through punk squats, nationalist compounds, and the homes of strangers.

Lillian is constantly traversing through vast space, and absorbing new roles, identities, and political beliefs without question. The Sweet East presents a chaotic, unstable wandering, where the road is less about discovery than about slipping between competing realities, each more absurd and sinister than the last.

Where The Sweet East shows a young woman drifting through identities, Andrea Arnold’s American Honey (2016) captures a generation wandering through broken promises. The film immerses us in the chaotic, freewheeling life of teenage-girl Star (a name loaded with “American Dream” connotation), who leaves her unstable home to join a ragtag crew of teens traveling across the Midwest selling magazine subscriptions. Led by the volatile Krystal and the magnetic Jake, the group moves from motel to motel. The kids seize moments of joy, but those bursts of ecstasy are always framed by exploitation. They are constantly broke, hustling to make sales, their earnings swallowed up by Krystal’s rules and the costs of survival on the road.

The crux of American Honey is a story about duality and tension, between the freedom of leaving everything behind, and the precarity of having nowhere to go. The American landscape is now one of bleak gas stations, Walmart parking lots, and endless stretches of highway, which may evoke glimpses of possibility under certain light, but also embody emptiness, cycles of labor and deferred dreams. The classic road film often mythologized the outlaw or wanderer, but American Honey grounds its characters in harsh economic reality.

The restless motion of American Honey finds its echo in Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland (2020), though here, these wanderers are in a very different stage of life. The film follows Fern (Frances McDormand), a widow whose Nevada town has collapsed after the 2008 financial crisis. With no home and no steady work, she joins a community of modern nomads, older Americans living out of vans, traveling for seasonal jobs, surviving on the fringes of an economy that has abandoned them. Nomadland uncovers a breathless intimacy born from people bound together by loss due to systems and circumstances larger than their control. Zhao depicts the road as sublime and indifferent. The film resonates with America’s broader restlessness and isolation, particularly in a post-COVID world, where the fantasy of endless mobility collides with reality.

Perhaps there have always been hints of fracture and estrangement in every American road film, shadows lingering beneath that hearty promise of freedom. Even at their most mythic, these films carried a sense of unease. In Paris, Texas (1984), the desert landscape is as alienating as it is redemptive. In David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990), the open road becomes a surreal nightmare of violence and desire. Bonnie and Clyde (1967) turned its lovers into outlaws not because society failed to contain them, but because they could never belong within it, similar to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969).

So what does it mean to move through and move forward in a country at a great point of unrest, where our foundations, the grounds we walk on, the “roads” themselves, feel fragile, cracked, and teetering on collapse? What will this do to our art, stories, the structures of our films? Maybe this particular genre has always lived at the intersection of liberation and loss, and its modern incarnations simply push the shadow to the surface, making fracture, rather than freedom, the defining feature. America, endlessly in motion, unsure of its destination, still driving forward into the dark.

Audrey Weisburd is an arts and culture writer from Austin, Texas, currently living in Brooklyn. She also writes short fiction and poetry. She shares her work on Instagram @audrey.valentine.