Laurens, Iowa. Alvin Straight, a seventy-three-year-old who lives with his daughter, Rose, learns that his brother Lyle, whom he hasn't spoken to in ten years, has suffered a heart attack. Before it's too late, he decides to travel to Mount Zion, Wisconsin, to meet him. Not by bus or train, because Alvin wants to drive himself, at his own pace and in his own way. No longer holding a driver's license, he has no choice but to drive a lawnmower and slowly savor the wonders of the American Midwest.
Released in 1999, between the two dark dives into psychotic neo-noir of Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, The Straight Story—a translation that loses the nuance of the original The Straight Story, which played on the ambivalence of "straight," both Alvin's surname and an attribute of moral rectitude—is historically considered an anomaly in David Lynch's oeuvre.
Anomaly because it is characterized by a seemingly more classic and traditional style, in a microcosm where singularity is the rule. But this is only appearance, the result of a superficial investigation of a film that, on the contrary, deserves only in-depth examination. The Straight Story, on the other hand, is a sort of summa of Lynch's cinema, charged with self-referentiality from its most phenotypical elements: from the starry sky that opens and closes the film, as in Dune, to the opening sequence, which, between gardens to be watered and heart attacks, recalls Blue Velvet, to the dotted line dividing the lanes of an endless highway. as in Wild at Heart and Lost Highway." (Emanuele Sacchi)
