Counterculture classic and a rambling road movie par excellence. This one haunts you for a little while. Captain America (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) are hippie drug dealers who retire after a huge cocaine deal and ride motorcycles from Los Angeles to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. Captain America is the quietly intense guy who mostly lives in his own head. Billy is the more high-strung, confrontational character. Motoring across the plains, deserts, and mountain vistas of the American southwest, they meet odd characters, smoke bushels of marijuana (real marijuana was used in the film), and get hassled by small town hillbillies all to a score of shaggy album tracks by the likes of The Byrds, Jimi Hendrix, The Band and Steppenwolf.
There were many biker films in the late 1960s, but most of them were violent exploitation movies (and Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper had been in a few of them). Here, Dennis Hopper, in his debut as a director, makes a biker art film full of wild post-French New Wave editing flourishes, improvised dialogue and little emphasis on plot. It’s also something of a western. In one early scene, Hopper makes it clear that he sees Captain America (real name: Wyatt, as in Wyatt Earp) and Billy (as in Billy the Kid) as modern cowboys who ride motorcycles instead of horses.
There’s a pall over this one. It’s no celebration of hippie culture. The scenery is gorgeous, but no one in the movie gets what they want. Even the idealistic hippie commune that Fonda and Hopper run into in the middle of the desert is doomed to fail, either due to their in-fighting or to the fact that they’re all former city dwellers who are inept at farming. And when Fonda and Hopper drop acid (with prostitutes Karen Black and Toni Basil) in a Louisiana cemetery, their trip is so nightmarish that it could almost scare someone off of wanting to try it. 
Still, the film was a major hit that resonated with young audiences. It’s one of those movies that gives you a lot to talk about after you’ve seen it. Today, it still sits as one of the most important films of its time for its influence on the new wave of more personal American movies from young filmmakers who were interested in iconoclasm, anti-heroes as lead characters, and freer depictions of sex and drug use. It was also Jack Nicholson’s acting breakthrough outside of exploitation films. He makes a huge impression in a small part as a boozy lawyer who rides with Fonda and Hopper after waking up with them in the same jail cell. The next year, he’d become a star for his role in Five Easy Pieces.