Road Scholar

America is a big country. It’s a young country. It’s diverse. It’s a little crazy. That roughly sums up what Andrei Codrescu discovered during his cross-country journey in the documentary Road Scholar.

Codrescu is no Tocqueville, and his observations on American culture lack the critical perception of his 19th-century French counterpart. (Of course, Tocqueville didn’t drive a Cadillac, and Codrescu does – score one for Andrei.)

Codrescu is a Romanian-Jewish writer who came to the United States in the 1960s. He’s the author of numerous books of poetry and critical essays, but he’s probably best known as a commentator on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. His thick Transylvanian accent is immediately recognizable; so is his detached, slightly off-center sense of humor.

Though he didn’t know how to drive, Codrescu was persuaded to load up a film crew in a bright red Cadillac (convertible, naturally) and take a spin from New York to San Francisco. Born to be semi-wild, the Beat poet of Bucharest took the bold step of attending driving school.

Road Scholar opens with Codrescu graduating to the open freeways of his adopted land. For the rest of the film, he takes us on a meandering cruise from the Statue of Liberty to the Golden Gate Bridge, searching for the American utopia.

What he finds is a non-cohesive culture, a landscape of radically divergent communities that have shared aspirations, but very little common social ground. It’s as if the whole country was spinning in hundreds of different directions at once.

Even such basic forces as god, sex and money keep turning up in wildly different ways. The closet that Codrescu comes to the conventional “American dream” is a perfectly preserved, 1950s-era McDonald’s hamburger stand in Chicago.

Surprisngly, Codrescu also discovers that religion – albeit in widely diverging forms – is one of the main links that connects our disparate country. He stays briefly at a Mennonite community in upstate New York, he passes through enclaves of New Mexican Pueblo Indians, Sikh immigrants, die-hard hippies and New Age practitioners. He even meets a black gospel choir whose members combine singing with roller skating. (Yes, they call themselves the Holy Rollers.)

More than anything else, Road Scholar becomes a cockeyed spiritual quest. (Although, ironically, one thing Codrescu couldn’t find was an open church.)

Ultimately, Road Scholar offers a whimsical tour of a delightfully and deliriously perplexing land.