'Gasoline Rainbow' Is a Touching Ode to Teenage Possibility and Insecurity

I can’t even imagine how difficult it must be to make a film about the teenage experience. Capturing the raw, exposed nerve energy of that heightened period in a sensitive way while also not shying away from its inherent absurdity is the finest of lines to walk. Films that do it well—films like Boyhood, Rushmore, How to Have Sex—can feel like minor miracles sometimes, contrasted as they are against the proliferation of patronising, reductive drivel that audiences are so often spoonfed. We’re all stupid when we’re teenagers, yes, but we’re also tapped into something fundamental in a way that happens only once in life and is usually forgotten or lost on the relentless march to maturity, jobs, and death.

Translating real-life authenticity onto the big screen is something the writer-director duo of Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross showed they could do very well indeed with 2020’s wonderful, elegiac ode to dive bars, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets. Their latest film, Gasoline Rainbow (a name that one hundred percent sounds as if it could belong to a classic shoegaze band, and I mean that as a compliment)—which had a limited theatrical run in the U.S. on May 10, 2024, and is now streaming on Mubi—emphasizes the faux documentary feel less, but hammers home the feelings just as much as Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets.

Focusing on five teenagers from a small town in Oregon who yearn for escape and who decide to take a road trip to the coast to share one last adventure together at a mythical ‘party at the end of the world’ before adult life and its attendant responsibilities kick in, Gasoline Rainbow wears its heart on its sleeve, but it doesn’t pander or condescend. Similar to Bloody Nose Empty Pockets, the Ross brothers have chosen for their cast a group of first-time actors, their characters’ stories being based on their own. They deserve to have their names spotlighted here: Tony Abuerto, Micah Bunch, Nichole Dukes, Nathaly Garcia, and Makai Garza. All are excellent, turning in naturalistic performances that breathe fresh life into adolescent cliché.

Adolescent cliché sounds like an insult. It isn’t. Cliché is, after all, a matter of perspective. From the point of view of my crusty, mid-to-elder Millennial (keeping it purposefully vague to sidestep the gnawing fear of mortality) self, teenage sentiment might feel trite and juvenile. Yet I remember how all-encompassing, vital, and new it all felt at the time. The surging yet tremulous tides that define those brief years mark the peak of life’s intensity at that point. The scale of possibilities, the sense of a future yet unwritten—it’s powerful stuff! Gasoline Rainbow captures this with an epic sweep that’s an almost natural byproduct of road movies, but it’s not interested in the overblown or histrionic that frequently accompanies it; instead, it softens and slows things down with an understated, intimate sensibility. That sense of teenage energy and possibility is never divorced from an emotional insecurity inherent to adolescence itself, but also an economic one tied to the group’s particular backgrounds.

It doesn’t hurt that the film is gorgeous to look at, with the Ross brothers’ cinematography capturing beauty in the commonplace as well as the spectacular. The 513 miles between the teens’ small town and the Pacific Ocean are filled with sights, sounds, and—crucially—people, that the duo’s camera shoots with the fresh, inquiring perspective of its protagonists. Reminiscent of the work of Jeremy Saulnier, there is a real appreciation and understanding here of the texture of working class American life—without the patronizing romanticization that other filmmakers so often feel the need to slip into the mix. ‘Solidarity over charity’ goes the popular saying. Gasoline Rainbow understands this. It also knows that, sometimes, solidarity takes the form of some Lord of the Rings-loving metalheads who let you crash at their place before serving you breakfast while the music from the Shire movie sequences plays over the speakers. If that isn’t beautiful, I don’t know what is.