American Vagabond

Life on the road is one of the key motifs of North American culture. Born from the historic and existential roots of the settlers and American Indian peoples, it spans literature, music and film. It is from this theme that the story of the film, and the aesthetics adopted to tell it, take shape: an account of vagrancy where the real and the imagined become one and the same. A young man leaves his small provincial town where his parents refuse to accept his homosexuality. In the company of his teenage lover, he heads for San Francisco, a fantastical mirage for the gay community. Yet their dreams are shattered against an inhospitable reality. And the return will be fraught with danger. American writers and filmmakers (John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, Larry Clark, Gus Van Sant, etc.) keep vigil, implicitly, like silent witnesses to this representation of rebellion, reverie and repression. Through fragments of reality and acts re-enacted by the protagonists, the film creates its own mythology so as to transmit to the audience the painful sense of youth lost and impetus withdrawn.