Even now, more than 25 years later, that David Lynch directed “The Straight Story” seems to defy logic. Here was a filmmaker who proudly flouted expectations in every capacity, including whether or not critics liked him. (To wit: his previous film, the 1997 thriller “Lost Highway,” netted very bad reviews indeed, and to lean into that, Lynch pursued a new marketing campaign touting the bad reviews the way that most studios trumpet positive reviews.) And what was his latest film? A G-rated movie literally from Walt Disney Pictures about an old man riding on a tractor through the American Midwest. And of course, all of that is what happens in “The Straight Story,” which also has a 95 on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s not the kind of film that you would expect from most filmmakers, let alone Lynch. But now, in the year of our Lord 2025, it’s easier than you might think to reconcile Lynch with the material. This is the same man who proudly delivered cheerful and banal weather reports from Los Angeles for years, so why not make a movie about Alvin Straight?
Based on a true story, “The Straight Story” depicts the journey of Alvin Straight as he takes his John Deere roughly 240 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin so he can see his ailing brother (Harry Dean Stanton), from whom he’s been estranged for a long time. Richard Farnsworth stars as Straight, in a film as uncompromising yet unerringly simple as anything Lynch had ever made. For anyone who saw it initially, it may have been easy to watch and wonder when the other shoe would drop and when the movie would get strange and off-putting and goofily weird. But that moment never comes; “The Straight Story” is a powerfully effective, if quiet film that never veers off its own course, much as Straight himself took the journey in 1994. The film has a much sadder context now than it did when it was released in 1999, as Farnsworth was ailing himself from terminal prostate cancer while filming, and ended his own life the following year.
David Lynch’s filmography is full of the inexplicable and mysterious; it’s part of what made him such a special, vital, and beloved filmmaker. And the good news, if you have either/or The Criterion Channel and Disney+, is that you can stream both “Blue Velvet” and “The Straight Story,” if you’re looking for just the very best of his work. But Lynch had plenty of other good work too. That he didn’t have too many super-high scores on aggregation sites shouldn’t stop you. Dive into Lynch’s work; he deserved the attention before and he still does now.