We’ve seen many biopics about musical greats like Ray Charles and Johnny Cash, butThe Last Ride brings a fresh slant to a hoary genre.  Instead of trying to tell the whole story of country music icon Hank Williams, it concentrates on the last two days of Williams’ life.  Everything is filtered through the eyes of a young man named Silas, who is hired to drive Williams from Montgomery, Alabama to a New Year’s Eve concert in Charleston, West Virginia.  This film’s modesty is very becoming, and it benefits from spot-on performances and a beautifully detailed sense of time and place.

Silas (Jesse James) is working in a car repair shop in 1952 when someone with a nifty blue Cadillac comes in inquiring about a possible driving gig.  The man doesn’t reveal the identity of the passenger, and Silas knows nothing about music, anyway.  For him, it’s a respite from a dead-end job and a chance to drive the hottest car on the road.  When he shows up to meet the mysterious Mr. Wells (played by onetime child star Henry Thomas, the lead in E.T.), Silas finds a temperamental taskmaster who has a fondness for booze and other illegal substances.  A few people on the road seem to recognize Mr. Wells, but in a pre-internet age when even television was not available to everyone, celebrities had the chance to remain more reclusive and unknowable than they are today.  Over the course of their two-day journey, Silas begins to come out of his shell, and Wells discovers the possibilities of a selfless friendship that a star rarely gets to experience.

While the film was made on a tight budget, it brings the past to life.  Director Harry Thomason (best known as a TV producer and a supporter of his Arkansas pal, Bill Clinton) has an innate feel for the back roads of the South.  The cars alone—recruited from local car club denizens—have a seductive sheen.  And Thomason has a rapport with his actors.  Thomas has done a number of films as an adult—notably Legends of the Fall and the recent tearjerker, Dear John—but this is some of his best work ever.  He captures the arrogance and also the loneliness of a reluctant superstar.  Jesse James also began as a child actor; he played Helen Hunt’s sickly son in James L. Brooks’ As Good As It Gets.  He makes Silas’s innocence very charming.  There’s a fine moment when the jaded, dissipated Mr. Wells announces that he is only 29 years old, and Silas realizes they may have more in common than he thought.  It’s only at the very end that he learns the identity of his surly passenger, and by that time, the bond between them has grown to be deeply poignant.

The film uses a few choice samples of Hank Williams’ music, but we’re mainly captivated by the incisive two-character drama of a boy just reaching manhood and a man whose youth is far behind him.  During a summer of gaudy, numbing blockbusters, this tender human drama deserves to be discovered and savored.