‘A gentle poetry in the everyday’: why The Straight Story is my feelgood movie

3 hours ago 9

What was your gateway into the Lynchian empire? Maybe it was the elliptical horror of Mulholland Drive, with its labyrinth of dream and deceit. Perhaps it was the small-town banality of Twin Peaks or Blue Velvet, the gee-whiz vernacular and cherry-pie dispositions hiding a malice so pure behind those white picket fences. Or was it Wild at Heart, that nightmarish road movie where oddballs and deviants lurk at every bend, Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern tearing through America with unbridled passion and violence?

Weirdly, it was none of those for me. In fact, my introduction to David Lynch contained not one drop of sexual depravity or grisly malevolence. The film was The Straight Story and I was 15. Released in May 1999, it tells the real-life tale of Alvin Straight, a 73-year-old second world war vet who rode a lawnmower 300 miles across the midwest to reconcile with his ailing brother. While the title obviously names the main character, it also invites you to take Lynch at his word: that this is that fabled chronicler of the demented and the macabre playing it straight(ish). Think of it as Lynch does Disney: a family-friendly hymn to Americana, sparse and only a little bit strange, finding a gentle poetry in the everyday.

My love for this Homeric tale deepened around a decade ago, when I was commissioned to write about the making of the film. I spoke to Mary Sweeney – Lynch’s longtime editor, producer and then partner – who told me how she’d come across the story in the first place, reading about Straight’s odyssey in the New York Times. Charmed by the man’s plucky attitude, she optioned the rights, wrote the screenplay with a childhood friend, John Roach, and brought it to Lynch.

Cast in the lead role was Richard Farnsworth, a stuntman turned Oscar-nominated actor for 1978’s Comes a Horseman. A picture of stoic defiance in his red plaid jacket and cowboy hat, he nails Straight’s contradictions: stubborn yet tender, infirm yet unstoppable. There is a flinty gravitas to his work, and a low-key dignity too, shimmering in the ice-blue pools of his rheumy eyes. That he knew this was his swan song, terminally ill as he was during the shoot, means his grizzled face becomes a canvas on to which ache and acceptance paint themselves. He was 79; he didn’t live to see himself lose to Kevin Spacey at the Oscars for American Beauty.

The film around Farnsworth, scored with a blend of mournful Spanish guitar and folksy fiddle by Lynch stalwart Angelo Badalamenti, cruises along in perfect harmony with his talents. Serving up succour for the soul, it drifts from scene to scene with a hushed profundity, alighting on the various exchanges with people Straight meets on the road: a pregnant runaway, a woman hysterical after hitting a deer, a pair of squabbling twin mechanics and a retired John Deere employee who lets Alvin camp in his back yard. Most poignant of all, though, is a tavern scene in Iowa, where Straight, sipping a glass of milk, opens up to a fellow veteran. “That is one thing I can’t shake loose,” he laments. “All my buddies’ faces are still young. And the thing is, the more years I have, the more they’ve lost.”

Throughout that sequence, Freddie Francis, the film’s venerable cinematographer, holds his lens on Farnsworth’s face, the subtle twitches saying as much as the dialogue itself. It was the final film for Francis too, and equally Oscar-worthy, though not nominated: amid sweeping vistas, crops harvested in a wash of magic-hour light and roads stretching into the infinite distance, each shot is as evocative as that one creased, weather-beaten visage.

Watching it now, since Lynch’s own death in January 2025, carries an added pathos. In his final years, he too found walking difficult, then impossible, his lungs ravaged by decades of smoking, much like Straight’s. Acclaimed though the film was, it made just $6.2m at the US box office – less than its $10m budget – and remains a relatively unknown gem. Whenever I’ve watched it with someone, though, their verdict has always been the same: that it’s deeply moving.

The exquisite last scene belongs to Harry Dean Stanton, an actor who knew a thing or two about laconic devastation, having spent Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (my favourite movie) saying almost nothing at all. “Did you ride that thing all the way out here to see me?” says Stanton’s Lyle, glancing at the lawnmower, lip quivering, years of resentment dissolving in a single frame. “I did, Lyle,” comes the reply. It’s a flawless ending. Emerging untouched is just about inconceivable.