Gasoline Rainbow – first-look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

Gaso­line Rain­bow – first-look review

07 Sep 2023

Words by Hannah Strong

Group of people sitting on the roof of a van, which is parked in a field at sunset. A campfire burns in the foreground.
Group of people sitting on the roof of a van, which is parked in a field at sunset. A campfire burns in the foreground.
A group of teenagers set off on a post-grad­u­a­tion road trip in Bill and Turn­er Ross’s lat­est fea­ture, billed as their first fiction.

Bill and Turn­er Ross have been steadi­ly mak­ing a name for them­selves on the Amer­i­can inde­pen­dent film cir­cuit for some time now, but it’s fair to say that their break­out moment came in 2020 with Bloody Nose, Emp­ty Pock­ets – a free­wheel­ing fly-on-the-wall obser­va­tion about the final night of busi­ness in a Las Vegas dive bar. The bar, in actu­al­i­ty, was not a real place, but the non-pro­fes­sion­al actors and pro­vid­ed liquor cer­tain­ly were, cre­at­ing an inti­mate, booze-sod­den glimpse into mid­dle Amer­i­ca and the beau­ty of barfly life. They make their offi­cial for­ay into fic­tion film­mak­ing with Gaso­line Rain­bow, which fol­lows a group of new­ly mint­ed high school grad­u­ates as they set off on a road trip in search of the par­ty at the end of the world”.

The five friends (Tony Abuer­to, Mic­ah Bunch, Nic­hole Dukes, Nathaly Gar­cia, Makai Garza, all cred­it­ed as them­selves”) leave their tiny town in Ore­gon and head for the Pacif­ic coast, piled into a van with only a ruck­sack each and a killer playlist to see them through. Along the way, they befriend strangers who open­ly embrace them, and when the jour­ney gets tough, a help­ing hand is nev­er far.

Filmed in what has become the Ross Broth­ers’ sig­na­ture lo-fi style, with cam­era phone and hand­held footage incor­po­rat­ed into the mix, it’s a fly-on-the-wall take on teenage wan­der­lust, and the lack of strict script leaves room for the cast to fill in the gaps, cre­at­ing a more authen­tic por­trait of con­tem­po­rary youth. But with five cen­tral char­ac­ters and a mix of sup­port­ing play­ers in con­tention, it’s dif­fi­cult to real­ly feel a strong con­nec­tion with the group, and the film’s abun­dance of wide shots only increas­es this sense of distance.

That said, the film def­i­nite­ly isn’t with­out its charms. One scene where the group end up stay­ing on a house­boat out­side of Port­land with a cou­ple of friend­ly punks is par­tic­u­lar­ly delight­ful; in the morn­ing one of the hosts pops Howard Shore’s The Shire’ on the speak­ers as he cooks break­fast, telling the gang, I feel like Tom Bom­badil” as he cuts up apples.

It’s a mean­der­ing take on mid­dle Amer­i­ca, but the jour­ney nev­er feels too long. It just feels a lit­tle famil­iar, even with the Ross Broth­ers’ knack for giv­ing peo­ple space to per­form in ways that don’t feel like per­for­mances. Despite its affa­ble, every­man pro­tag­o­nists and excel­lent title, Gaso­line Rain­bow lacks the stay­ing pow­er of their pre­vi­ous fea­ture, and feels more of a con­tin­u­a­tion than an evo­lu­tion or expan­sion of style.

You might like