MUBI Presents: Gasoline Rainbow

The Ross brothers (Broken Nose, Empty Pockets; Western) may be the least seen great filmmakers in the United States right now. Gasoline Rainbow is a road movie and a pungent slice of pure, authentic Americana. Five high school graduates embark on a summer trip across the Pacific Northwest. Their destination is a beach party billed as “The End of the World”, but their real purpose is to delay what’s next — be it a job or college — and hang out with their lifelong friends for just a few weeks longer. When someone steals the tires from their van one night they’re forced to adapt their already loose itinerary, but this only brings them closer to the folks they encounter along the way.

Evocative of early Gus van Sant movies and Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, Gasoline Rainbow doesn’t strain for effect but quietly, curiously, reveals a corner of the world and the hopes and dreams of a handful of kids finding their way into it.

This exclusive screening is the Canadian premiere, and the only chance to see the film on the big screen prior to streaming on MUBI.

Virtual Q&A with directors Bill Ross IV & Turner Ross

Hopeful and soul-nourishing… An unusually poetic road film… Intense images keep hitting you at a rapid clip in a hallucinatory haze… Accompanying these images is a sonic tapestry that blends voices with the music and sounds of the settings, a perpetual humming of life… The fine-grained beauty of Gasoline Rainbow suggests a subterranean America, an America of true communal nurturing, an “old, weird America” that we can barely seem to acknowledge in the mediated world.

Chuck Bowen, Slant

Revelatory… an unvarnished look at being young, free and unsettled.

Tim Grierson, Screen

Accomplished and enjoyable… Gasoline Rainbow pays homage to all the road movies that ever were but is still its own quirky thing, uniquely of its time.

Leslie Felperin, Hollywood Reporter

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