Go East, Young Man Two-Lane Blacktop was supposed to be the next Easy Rider. But it went in a different direction.

Before it even saw the light of day, Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop was already being immortalized. Months before the film's release, Rolling Stone called it "an instant classic." Esquire went a step further, publishing the entire screenplay and anointing it "the movie of the year." On paper, the prospects looked good. Hollywood in the late 1960s had discovered the youth market. The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde (both 1967) inaugurated the countercultural trend in American movies; Easy Rider (1969) marked its apotheosis. Hellman's movie seemed like a can't-miss proposition: a road flick from Universal's new "youth" unit about dropping out and driving fast. But when it hit theaters in the summer of '71, the kids didn't show up. The movie died a quick death at the box office and eventually slid into oblivion, not appearing on video until 1999.

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How could such a sure thing fail so miserably? Perhaps because the hype primed the audience for a movie that Hellman was unwilling to give them. Unlike its contemporaries, Two-Lane Blacktop wasn't a sentimental celebration of restless youth. Refusing to play to its demographic, it offered an abstract and diffident vision of the counterculture. Unlike The Graduate, it didn't romanticize youthful disaffection; unlike Bonnie and Clyde, there was no cathartic violence; unlike Easy Rider, there was little sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Yet the reasons moviegoers rejected it at the time—its skepticism and rigor—are the same reasons the film, released this month on DVD by the Criterion Collection, has emerged as one of the great movies of Hollywood's last golden age.

Rudolph Wurlitzer and Will Corry's screenplay is as simple as they come. A pair of drifters roam the highways of the American West in a souped-up '55 Chevy. They have no stated destination and no obvious motivation. At a gas station, they run into a middle-aged man (Warren Oates) behind the wheel of a yellow Pontiac GTO. They agree to a contest: a race to the East Coast, with the winner getting the loser's car. The bet seems to set us up for a furious chase and a hellacious climax, but the movie has other ideas. Instead of blazing off into the distance, it meanders, luxuriates in interludes, then just peters out.

The film's obvious antecedent is Easy Rider. Dennis Hopper's hippie road movie was a seismic event that shook up the culture. Hopper created a pop myth for young Americans that tapped into their fondest—and darkest—fantasies. The story of two bikers, Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Hopper), who hit the open road, the movie turned viewers on with its pharmaceutical, sensual, and musical pleasures (not to mention Jack Nicholson's star-making supporting turn, the most enduring of its joys). Hopper's movie was decked out with the signifiers of '60s cool: dope, LSD, long hair, free love, rock 'n' roll. But it also validated the young audience's suspicions of a hostile America out to get them. Before they reach their destination, the bikers are gunned down by rednecks. Thus did Wyatt and Billy join Bonnie and Clyde in the pantheon of counterculture martyrs.

In her review of the movie, Pauline Kael described Easy Rider's "sentimental paranoia," noting how it tapped into the notion that "it was cool to feel that you couldn't win, that everything was rigged and hopeless." Hopper's movie was a bummer, but it was a bummer that affirmed the counterculture's values. By contrast, Hellman's film resists celebrating the outsider ethos it depicts. Two-Lane Blacktop also centers on a peripatetic duo (James Taylor and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson), but they couldn't be more different from Easy Rider's pothead bikers. With their blank expressions and affectless delivery, the two are pointedly anti-charismatic. Long stretches of silence are interrupted only by idle chitchat and car talk. If Hopper's heroes invoke Western legends (Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid), Hellman's don't even have names (Taylor is simply "The Driver," while Wilson is "The Mechanic"). So removed are they from society and all that it has to offer that the presence of an attractive hitchhiker (Laurie Bird, known as "The Girl") barely registers. As for Warren Oates' GTO, he fancies himself a smooth operator, but he can't hide his desperate need for company. If The Driver and The Mechanic drive to lose themselves, GTO roams the land in search of others.

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