Breezy Rider: A Shaggy, Charming Over-the-Hill-Biker Flick

Donaldson, a decent light-action director whose spotty Hollywood career reveals selectiveness if little else, chronicled the real-life Munro in his 1972 doc Offerings to the God of Speed, and his fondness for the subject is evident; Indian largely eschews excessive speed-junkie thrills in favor of sharp, affectionate characterization, and its stabs at an overarching message—something about holding on to your dreams no matter how old you get—are mercifully minimized. Which isn't to say that Indian is a masterwork of realism or even Lynchian homespun weirdness: Munro's stopover in a cartoonishly freakified L.A. is banal and tedious, and the dubious distinction of making one's loud, stinking machine go faster than anyone else's loud, stinking machine hardly amounts to a universal preoccupation. Moreover, Hopkins—whose interiority, unlike his feigned Kiwi accent, fits the role nicely—phones in a good deal of his performance. But Donaldson and his cast still manage to capture something of the strange randomness of existence here, and the result is a film as tenacious, peculiar, and likable as Burt Munro himself.