The Straight Story

Plot

In Laurens, Iowa, elderly Alvin Straight is found lying on his kitchen floor after a fall. His daughter, Rose, takes him to see a doctor, who admonishes him to give up tobacco, improve his diet, and use a walker, all of which he rejects. When Alvin's brother, Lyle, suffers a stroke, Alvin decides to visit Lyle, even though they have not spoken in ten years.

Lyle lives in Mount Zion, Wisconsin, 240 miles away. As neither Alvin (due to his age) nor Rose (due to an unspecified disability) has a driver's license, Alvin decides to make the trip on his riding mower. His plan surprises his family, friends, and neighbors. The mower soon breaks down, forcing Alvin to accept a ride from a passing tour bus and call for help. However, he is determined to continue the trip, and buys a used 1966 John Deere 110 lawn tractor to continue his journey.

Alvin meets a variety of people on the road. He shares his dinner with a young girl hitchhiker, who ran away from home out of fear that her family would be upset with her pregnancy. Alvin reflects about the importance of family, comparing it to a bundle of sticks that is hard to break compared to a single stick. The next day, she leaves him a bundle of sticks tied together as a thank-you. Several passing RAGBRAI cyclists are amused to see him on the highway and welcome him to their campsite. He speaks with some of the cyclists about growing old. He also meets a distraught woman who hit a deer during her commute and tearfully rants about how she keeps on hitting deer despite her prayers. Alvin respectfully cooks and eats the deer.

Alvin's tractor begins to fail, throwing his journey into jeopardy. His transmission fails as he travels down a steep hill, but he manages to stop. Danny, a local, invites Alvin to camp in his backyard until the tractor is repaired. He offers to drive Alvin to Mount Zion, but Alvin declines, preferring to travel his own way.

Running low on cash, Alvin calls Rose to send him his Social Security check. Two bickering mechanics overcharge him for fixing his tractor, but he cannily bargains the price down. A fellow veteran invites Alvin for a drink, and they exchange traumatic stories about their experiences in World War II. Alvin, a sniper during the war, declines a beer but confesses that he is still haunted by killing an American in a friendly fire incident and says that he became an alcoholic when he got back home, but he is now sober.

After crossing into Wisconsin, Alvin chats with a Catholic priest who knows of Lyle and his stroke. The priest says that Lyle never mentioned a brother. Alvin admits that he wants to make amends. Although the exact cause of the estrangement is never stated, only that being the one to make the effort is hard on him, Alvin says alcohol was involved.

Alvin finally arrives in Mount Zion. To steel himself, he drinks his first beer in years. Tractor trouble stops him just short of Lyle's dilapidated cabin, but he persists. Lyle invites Alvin to sit together on the porch, without recrimination or bitterness. He asks if Alvin rode the tractor all the way just to see him. Alvin quietly confirms this, and Lyle's eyes well up with tears. The two men sit together silently and gaze up at the stars.

Cast

• Richard Farnsworth as Alvin Straight
• Sissy Spacek as Rose Straight
• Harry Dean Stanton as Lyle Straight
• Everett McGill as Tom the John Deere Dealer
• John Farley as Thorvald Olsen
• Kevin Farley as Harald Olsen
• Jane Galloway Heitz as Dorothy
• Joseph Carpenter as Bud
• Donald Wiegert as Sig
• Ed Grennan as Pete
• Jack Walsh as Apple
• Dan Flannery as Doctor Gibbons
• Anastasia Webb as Crystal (the hitchhiking runaway)
• Barbara Robertson as Deer woman
• James Cada as Danny Riordan
• Sally Wingert as Darla Riordan
• Wiley Harker as Verlyn Heller
• John Lordan as Priest
• Russ Reed as Barkeeper in Mt. Zion
• Max the Wonder Dog as Farm Dog}}

Production

Development

In 1994, 73-year-old Alvin Straight rode a lawnmower across roughly 250 miles of the American Midwest to visit his ailing brother. Mary Sweeney, David Lynch's frequent collaborator, read about Straight's story in The New York Times that summer. Said Sweeney, "Growing up in Wisconsin, I easily connected with that kind of stoic, non-verbal, stubborn, idiosyncratic American character. I get how hard it is to have quiet pride and dignity when you're old and poor and are living in the middle of nowhere. I understand what these people's dreams and frustrations are. And I loved how much his journey captured the national imagination, so, wearing my producer's hat, I started trying to secure the rights."

Producer Ray Stark had already acquired the rights to Straight's story and envisioned the project as a potential star vehicle for Paul Newman. Straight died in 1996, and the rights to his story became available again. Sweeney co-wrote the script with John Roach, a childhood friend; the two retraced Straight's route in the process of writing. When Lynch saw the finished script he immediately took to it, saying "it became, for me, very real."

Casting

For the role of Alvin Straight, producers cast their first choice, Richard Farnsworth. Though he was reluctant to commit to the role as he was then terminally ill with metastatic prostate cancer, he took the role out of admiration for Straight. Sissy Spacek, a longtime friend of Lynch's who had helped to finance his earlier film Eraserhead, was cast as Alvin's daughter, Rose. Harry Dean Stanton was cast as Alvin's ailing brother.

Filming

The Straight Story was independently shot along the actual route taken by Straight, and all scenes were shot in chronological order in the autumn of 1998. Alvin Straight's real-life residence was used as his home in the film and Straight's neighbors in the film were his actual neighbors. Lynch would later call the film "my most experimental movie".

During production, Farnsworth's cancer had spread to his bones, but he astonished his co-workers with his tenacity during production. The paralysis of his legs as shown in the film was real. Farnsworth died by suicide on October 6, 2000, at the age of 80.

After a successful debut at Cannes, Buena Vista Pictures Distribution acquired distribution rights to the film in the United States, Australia and Scandivanian territories, where it would be released under the Walt Disney Pictures banner, while Le Studio Canal+ and Les Films Alain Sarde would share international sales. It was Peter Schneider, Disney's president of production at the time, that got the idea to have the studio acquire the film after seeing it at Cannes, calling it "a beautiful movie about values, forgiveness and healing and celebrates America. As soon as I saw it, I knew it was a Walt Disney film." October Films also negotiated for the rights, but a deal never materialized. The film was given a G rating by the MPAA (the only Lynch film to receive such a rating).

Music

The musical score for The Straight Story was composed by Angelo Badalamenti, continuing a 13-plus year collaboration with Lynch that began with Blue Velvet. A soundtrack album was released on October 12, 1999, by Windham Hill Records.

Soundtrack

All music composed and conducted by Angelo Badalamenti.

Home media

The Straight Story was released on DVD on November 7, 2000 by Buena Vista Home Entertainment (under the Walt Disney Home Video label). There are no chapter markers on the original North American DVD release, with a note written by Lynch inside the DVD case that reads, "It is my opinion that a film is not a book – it should not be broken up. It is a continuum and should be seen as such." On April 3, 2020, the film became available to stream on Disney+.

On September 17, 2021, The Straight Story received a limited edition Blu-ray release from Imprint Films.

On December 17, 2025, StudioCanal announced that a new 4K Ultra HD restoration of the film will be released on both 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray discs in the United Kingdom beginning February 9, 2026.

Reception

Critical reception

The Straight Story was critically acclaimed upon its release, with critics lauding Lynch's uncharacteristic subject matter. Entertainment Weekly described the film as a "celestial piece of Americana." The Chicago Tribune wrote of the film, "we see something American studio movies usually don't give us: the simple, unsentimentalized beauty of the rural American Midwestern landscape."

Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote, "the same bellwether quality that left Blue Velvet looking so prescient, and ushered in a whole cinematic wave of taboo-shattering, is at work once again. When a born unnaturalist like Lynch can bring such interest and emotion to one man's simple story, the realm of the ordinary starts looking like a new frontier." Of Farnsworth's performance, Maslin wrote, "he automatically frees the film from any sense of artifice and delivers an amazingly stalwart performance that will not soon be forgotten." Her review concluded, "The Straight Story is...about gazing at the sky, about experiencing each encounter to the fullest, than it is about getting anywhere in a hurry. It's been too long since a great American movie dared to regard life that way."

Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars, the first positive review he had given to a film by Lynch. He wrote: "The first time I saw The Straight Story I focused on the foreground and liked it. The second time I focused on the background, too, and loved it. The movie isn't just about the old Alvin Straight's odyssey through the sleepy towns and rural districts of the Midwest, but about the people he finds to listen and care for him."

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 95% based on 106 reviews, with an average rating of 8.2/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "With strong performances and director David Lynch at the helm, The Straight Story steers past sentimental byways on its ambling journey across the American heartland." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 86 out of 100, based on 32 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".

Accolades

The Straight Story was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival. For 21 years he held the record as the oldest person (at 79) to be nominated for a Best Actor Oscar. Farnsworth also won the 1999 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor for his performance in the film.

Notes

References

References

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