David Lynch spent most of his career making audiences uneasy. Eraserhead turned new fatherhood into a waking nightmare. Blue Velvet found something rotten underneath a tidy suburban lawn. Twin Peaks, which is still talked about a lot, took a small-town murder and used it as a door to somewhere much stranger.
Then, in 1999, that same director made a movie the MPAA rated G, and Walt Disney Pictures put its name on it in the US. The film is The Straight Story, and it’s about a 73-year-old man who drives a lawn mower across two states to see his brother.
A director known for the opposite of wholesome
Eraserhead through Blue Velvet set the tone
By the time The Straight Story arrived, Lynch’s reputation was already set. Eraserhead (1977) was a black-and-white fever dream about a man raising a mutant infant. Blue Velvet (1986) followed a severed ear into a small town’s criminal underbelly. Twin Peaks, his TV series with Mark Frost, ran a murder mystery straight from the fantastic first episode into the supernatural. None of it suggested a filmmaker who was one project away from a Disney release, let alone a G rating.
The film is based on a real trip. In 1994, a 73-year-old Iowa man named Alvin Straight learned that his estranged older brother, Henry, had suffered a stroke. Alvin wanted to see him, but diabetes and emphysema had damaged his eyesight badly enough that he could no longer hold a driver’s license. So he set out from Laurens, Iowa, on a riding lawn mower instead, towing a small trailer with camping gear, and pointed it toward his brother’s home across the Wisconsin border, about 240 miles away.
Two lawn mowers and six weeks on the road
The John Deere that finished the job
Alvin’s first mower broke down after about 25 miles. He replaced it with a 1966 John Deere 110, which fared better but still failed more than once along the way, including a breakdown just two miles from his destination that required a local farmer to push it the rest of the way. The full trip, all of it at a top speed of roughly five miles an hour, took six weeks, starting on July 5 and ending on August 15, 1994.
Lynch cast Richard Farnsworth as Alvin, with Sissy Spacek as his daughter Rose and Harry Dean Stanton as his brother, renamed Lyle for the film. Farnsworth was 79 during filming and privately battling terminal cancer, and the frailty audiences saw on screen was not entirely acting. The performance earned him a Best Actor nomination at the Academy Awards, making him the oldest nominee in that category at the time.
He died the following year.
The Straight Story premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1999, where it competed for the Palme d’Or, before Walt Disney Pictures released it in US theaters that October under its own name. It remains the only film in Lynch’s catalog to receive a G rating from the MPAA. Roger Ebert gave it four stars and called it his first fully positive review of a Lynch film, praising the people Alvin meets along the way. Lynch himself later described it as his most experimental movie, not despite its gentleness but because of it.
Judged next to Eraserhead or Blue Velvet, a G-rated Disney release about a lawn mower sounds like a punchline. Watched on its own, it’s one of the more sincere films in Lynch’s filmography, and proof that his idea of strange could stretch in either direction.
A different kind of surrealism worth revisiting
The movie still looks and sounds like a David Lynch project. The camera lingers on empty roads just as long as it did in his weirder work, and Angelo Badalamenti’s score does a lot of heavy lifting in the quiet stretches. What feels alien for Lynch is the lack of suspicion. Alvin spends six weeks breaking down in front yards and talking to strangers, and nobody tries to hurt him, hustle him, or reveal a terrible secret. They just give him a hand.
The movie also avoids turning Alvin into a cartoon. Driving a lawn mower along a highway shoulder for six weeks sounds ridiculous on paper, but Farnsworth never plays it for laughs. Alvin is stubborn, battered by old age, and carrying quiet regret. Knowing Farnsworth was in real physical pain while filming adds a layer of grit you can’t fake. Every interaction on the road—whether he’s talking to a pregnant runaway by a campfire or having a quiet drink with another World War II veteran at a bar—feels earned because he simply listens to people.
By the time he reaches Lyle’s porch in Wisconsin, the movie knows better than to drag out a big, dramatic speech. The two brothers just sit together, look at the mower, and look up at the night sky. In a modern streaming lineup packed with loud action movies and frantic pacing, a story that tops out at five miles an hour is a breath of fresh air. If you want to check out the gentlest movie Lynch ever made, The Straight Story is streaming now on Disney+. It’s another small reason your Disney+ subscription is worth it.