Along for the Ride
“Along for the Ride,” a documentary about actorwriter-director Dennis Hopper, is an intermittently interesting footnote to the cultural history of America in the late 1960s and early ’70s, specifically the chapter on Hollywood going off the rails. Hopper was a prototype of the era’s misunderstood, and sometime misguided, rebels — his fondness for thumbing his nose at the establishment, and for many forms of excess, led eventually to personal and professional crack-ups.
After the release and financial success of “Easy Rider” in 1969, Hopper was the king of movieland, which went into overdrive trying to seduce that film’s countercultural audience. Hopper persuaded Universal to fund “The Last Movie,” a colossally ambitious, odd and chaotic Western that he shot in the Andes and that wound up his undoing. “Along for the Ride” focuses on the making of “The Last Movie,” released in 1971, and its effects on Hopper’s career.
Much of “Along for the Ride” is narrated by Satya de la Manitou, for decades one of Hopper’s assistants, and an unabashed admirer of his talents. It’s an opinion he shares with the film’s director, Nick Ebeling, for whom this movie is clearly a labor of love. While it makes no attempt to cover up its subject’s huge appetite for drugs, booze and sex, the movie is a sympathetic account of a man it portrays as a genius.
After shooting scores of hours of footage in Peru, Hopper and his entourage retreated to the filmmaker’s place in Taos, where he edited the movie and partied very hard. Universal was extremely unhappy with the results, but Hopper had final cut, so the film was barely released, and quickly disappeared. It was trashed by critics as pretentious and incomprehensible. Hopper’s fall in Hollywood was as rapid as his rise, and seemed to only deepen his self-indulgent streak. Manitou describes “kidnapping” Hopper and driving him to much-needed rehab.
Hopper eventually bounced back, winning positive notices for his performances as Tom Ripley in Wim Wenders’ “The American Friend” (1977) and as the drug-addled, deranged Frank Booth in David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” (1986). (Wenders appears in “Along for the Ride” to recount a story of fisticuffs between Hopper and co-star Bruno Ganz.) Hopper continued to act, occasionally to high praise, and even landed a few directing gigs. He died of cancer in 2010 at age 73.
Manitou, who clearly shared his old boss’ penchant for everything countercultural, is an amiable sort and has some very entertaining stories to share. It’s impossible not to admire his loyalty to a man who must have been, at times, hellishly difficult to work for.
But in the end, the film seems overly worshipful of its subject, pressing us too hard to admire him as the prototype of the romantically selfdestructive artist. You may well leave “Along for the Ride” simply saddened at the spectacle of wasted talent — sparks of which could still be seen at times in his remaining career. There’s a sense that Hopper was as much a victim of the ’60s as one of its creators.