The Vintagent Classics: The Loveless

SUMMARY

The storyline is a Southern highway collision of Easy Rider with the Wild One, upping the ante on both films with talk of jailhouse ‘joybangs’, and darkly Faulknerian family drama.  The film opens with Willem Dafoe as Vance, in his first big screen role (after being fired from Heaven’s Gate!), an intimidating, greasy, and ultrasexy biker sleeping like Satan in the wilderness, right beside his Panhead.  ‘I wasn’t going to be no man’s friend today’, the movie begins, and he shortly proves his point when encountering the mythic Thunderbird from American Graffiti  – with, appropriately, a flat tire – complete with a round-heeled beauty waiting for a Real Man to rescue her.  Vance is a real man all right, and sees through George Lucas’ cliché script, taking his payment from the Thunderbird goddess in a way we don’t expect.

Vance’s gang soon appears, complaining that a primary chain has snapped; they need to make repairs, so are stuck in a no-name truck-stop town in Florida, en route to Daytona for the bike races. We learn the gang is recently sprung from prison, and tension quickly builds with the locals, echoed by Robert Gordon’s smokin’ Rockabilly soundtrack, as he plays himself, sort of, as Davis, well amped on ‘vitamins’ poured – in a quote from Scorpio Rising – from a salt shaker.  The dialogue is as curt and as stylized as the art direction, loaded with Americana and period quotations; yes, you’re in 1962 America … where lynch-mobs cool off with a Coke and a smile.

Vance is soon distracted by a sexy little vixen in a red Corvette, the seriously underage Telena (Marin Kanter, next seen in The Fabulous Stains), who reveals the car as a guilt-gift from her father (J.Don Fergurson as the deliriously despicable Tarver). When Vance meets Telena, the film explodes with anal sex, shotgun blasts, incest, boys with pink underpants, murder, drag races, strippers, and suicide.  

Somehow, Bigelow managed to keep these B-movie Bikesploitation plot points firmly steered towards the Art House, while the whole wicked machine flew right over the heads of critics and unsuspecting viewers alike.  It still does. The Loveless is triple-clever, deserving multiple viewings to savor the spare dialogue, gorgeous visuals, amazingly hot Willem Dafoe, and superb soundtrack. Watching it, you’ll feel just like Sportster Debbie after a drunk trucker goes down on her – unwashed and nasty, but knowing it was good. – Paul d’Orleans

RELATED MEDIA

Watch the full film at Cine Meccanica