Two-Lane Blacktop

Two-Lane Blacktop is a 1971 American road film directed and edited by Monte Hellman, from a screenplay by Rudy Wurlitzer and Will Corry. It stars musicians James Taylor and Dennis Wilson, Warren Oates, and Laurie Bird in the leading roles. The sparse, existentialist plot follows a group of street racers during a cross-country race through the American Southwest.

Universal Pictures commissioned the film in the wake of Easy Rider's monumental success. Hellman, who had previously worked in low-budget and independent films, developed the screenplay with Wurlitzer, then-known mainly as an underground writer, during an actual cross-country road trip. Filming took place in locations around the Southwest between August and October 1970.

On initial release, the film received generally positive reviews, but was not a commercial success. Over the years, it developed the reputation of a sleeper hit and a cult classic, and has been reevaluated as a major work of the New Hollywood movement. In 2012, the US Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

Plot

Two street racers—the Driver and the Mechanic—live on the road in their highly modified, primer-gray 1955 Chevrolet 150 two-door sedan drag car, drifting from town to town and earning income by challenging locals to impromptu races. While driving east on Route 66 from Needles, California, they pick up the Girl, a hitchhiker they meet at a diner in Flagstaff, Arizona.