Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.American siblings Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross made their mark in 2020 with an elusive hybrid, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets — an ostensible documentary that was more constructed than it seemed. In similar spirit, their Gasoline Rainbow, following five teenagers on a road trip, feels at once like documentary and structured fiction; along the way, the forces of happenstance and planning pull intriguingly in different directions.The protagonists — all credited by their real names, all identifying as misfits — have just left high school in Oregon. Future prospects are not great: for one boy, it looks like the military or nothing. They decide to spend their summer in search of adventure and “a place for weirdos”.When their van’s tyres are stolen, they continue on foot, then take the time-honoured route of hopping a freight train, in company with two young nomads. They hope to reach the summer’s fabled party, but it’s the journey that matters, and the people they meet. Gasoline Rainbow is populated by friendly counterculture types who seem to have simply cropped up along the way, descendants of the hipster underground documented by Kerouac in On the Road: neo-hippies, skaters, metal fans in their 40s and 50s (“old people,” the kids call them with initial wariness). We are given thumbnail sketches of the quintet in the form of brief voice-overs. But despite their self-awareness and troubled histories (parents in rehab, or deported to Mexico), the film is less about them as individuals than about what they see, and their dazzled response.There’s real exuberance in the unpredictability of the path, in the energies of the cast, and in the vivid, freewheeling imagery — shot by the directors, with stills inserted, some by the five leads. And the soundtrack is often surprising: who would have thought that Gen Zers would want to sing along to Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child o’ Mine”?★★★★☆Streaming on Mubi in the UK from May 31
