The film revolves around Hank Williams, who has decided to take a new experience as he tries to hire a local child to lead him across the Appalachian countryside. This new show appears to embody New Year's Eve in West Virginia and Ohio.
... an evocation of an era, of a lost-highway America evidenced today only in the roadside ruins of old service stations and downtown hotels, of a South before it was swamped by leveling and homogenizing waves of globalization and television.
A typical wax-museum reproduction of the American South in which every detail is Southern in bold all caps, and not a single scene over the course of the film's 102 minutes rings true.
Bearing all the hallmarks of a small-budget labor of love, The Last Ride is a leisurely paced but modestly engaging road trip that gets considerable mileage from the byplay between its two lead characters.
Film Journal International
June 21, 2012
Alabama teen drives country-music star Hank Williams on his fatal trip to a concert in West Virginia. Squeaky-clean period tale is well-mounted but thin.
The 1952 El Dorado represents Williams' success as a songwriter and country singer, but it also serves as his refuge from an increasingly chaotic life.
