Ignored upon release, Neil Young’s apocalyptic musical-comedy bears much the same idiosyncratic appeal as his best albums

“They just want me singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ for the rest of my goddamn life…” 

So says Timotheé Chalamet’s version of Bob Dylan in one of the trailers for A Complete Unknown (2024), James Mangold’s upcoming Dylan biopic. That predictably hacky line offers a pat summary of Dylan’s thoughts during one of the signpost moments of his biography. As legend has it, Dylan “went electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and never looked back, abandoning his acoustic protest anthems for a new sui generis sound. Depending on which version you watch —the 1982 theatrical release or the 2015 Director’s Cut — Neil Young and Dean Stockwell’s apocalyptic musical-comedy masterpiece, Human Highway, either opens or closes with a bastardization of the song Chalamet’s Dylan so derides. “The answer my friends,” says Booji Boy (Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh in a rubber baby mask), “is breaking in the wind, the answer is blowing out your rear.” The original lyrics of “Blowin’ in the Wind” retain their bracing, chastening qualities, but it’s easy to see why Dylan (real or cinematic) might reject the song’s unbecoming earnestness and why familiar staples of his folk-rock era don’t typically figure into setlists in recognizable form.

Young’s and Stockwell’s film¹ takes its name from a similar sort of tune, one of the tracks that might have helped situate Young, as he put it, “in the middle of the road.”² Young’s rejection of the fame and expectations that came with Harvest (1972) and No. 1 hit “Heart of Gold” resulted in his classic “ditch trilogy” of albums, an artistic reinvention nearly as important as Dylan’s. Despite, or perhaps because of, its namesake’s absence, Human Highway plays like an unfaithful cover in film form. Or, maybe it’s truer to the spirit of its one-of-a-kind writer, director, and star. If the song is “Human Highway” as Young might have done it alongside “dead weight” collaborators like David Crosby, Stephen Stills, or Graham Nash, the filmed version could only have come from Young. Jimmy McDonough devotes just a few paragraphs of his sprawling Young biography, Shakey, to Human Highway. Though he delves into the skepticism and scandal surrounding the production, he winds up with more than a grudging respect for the film, concluding, “But as hard as Human Highway is to fathom, it’s pure Neil Young.” 

Related: Injuring Eternity: Masked and Anonymous (2003), or Bob Dylan’s Masquerade by Brett Wright

Young “went electric” as early as side 1, track 1 of his sophomore LP, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. When Crazy Horse hits its stride on “Cinnamon Girl,” it’s clear that they’re leaving the troubadour of Young’s debut, the guy who sang “Sugar Mountain,” in the dust. Giving a film like Human Highway a title like “Human Highway” suits Young’s career-long rebellious streak and his aversion to giving audiences what they expect. “Computer Age,” “Transformer Man,” “Computer Cowboy” — they all might’ve made more fitting titles for Young’s abrasive-yet-easygoing comedy. And those are just the songs off Trans (1983), an album that contributed to an especially antagonistic period for Young and his label, Geffen Records, and whose tracks play several times throughout Human Highway. McDonough writes of Trans, “It was a bit of a shock, but perhaps not enough of one.” Both sides of the record begin with “bland, human-voiced numbers” as if to obscure the record’s real sound. Save perhaps that bland title, there’s no attempt to obscure Human Highway’s true nature. 

Though it saw its limited theatrical release³ the same year Trans hit shelves, Young mostly produced Human Highway over several years in the late ’70s. He sunk several million of his own dollars into the production, too. The finished product effectively combines elements from two separate projects. Young first intended to direct “a sixteen-millimeter rock and roll road movie” and also discussed a surreal parable called The Tree That Went to Outer Space with co-writers including Stockwell and Dennis Hopper. Ultimately, the film evolved to focus on Earth’s final day through the eyes of a mechanic named Lionel Switch (Young). Young initially intended to repurpose on-stage and behind-the-scenes footage to depict Lionel’s rock-star fantasies, but according to filmmaker Jeannie Field, quoted in Shakey, he eventually rejected the idea of a “music film” and recut Human Highway so that Lionel’s fantasies made up a smaller portion of its runtime. Revisiting the footage may have offered Young a way of escaping into cinematic fantasies, away from all the legal battles and feuds with his label for making records “uncharacteristic of Neil Young.”

The public’s dismissal of Trans hurt Young, primarily because he regarded his vocoder explorations as remarkably earnest and even nostalgic.⁴ For all their futuristic and technological connotations, songs like “Transformer Man” provided Young with the means to embrace both innovation and tradition, to return to his folky roots while continuing to subvert expectations. Human Highway showcases a similar sense of guarded sentimentality. Absurdity continually undercuts the naked emotion. In this sense, the film’s similarities to the work of David Lynch go far beyond shared cast members like Hopper, common locations like a diner, or a mutual distrust of atomic energy.

One especially memorable sequence could have come from Twin Peaks. Like countless moments in Lynch’s oeuvre, it finds an impossible balance between the ridiculous and sublime. Young and Lynch both understand the simultaneous power and absurdity of a song like Skeeter Davis’ “The End of the World,” which plays while diner waitress Irene (Geraldine Baron) tearfully regards a photo of the late owner, Big Otto (Dean Stockwell). The photo of Stockwell in old-man makeup is as funny as Baron’s reaction is heartbreaking. A model train passes by in the window beside Otto’s picture. It suits the emotions of the sequence, both massive and miniature, like articulating the apocalypse inside the few minutes of a pop song. Young permits the viewer to perform the role of the child playing with a train set, the teenage lover who has abandoned childish things and grown enamored of pop music, and the tsking parent reflecting on it all from a more mature perspective.

With their charming miniature sets and lightly carnivalesque soundtrack, Human Highway’s opening credits could herald the start of a children’s TV show. Mister Young’s Neighborhood is Linear Valley, a town in the southwestern desert. Maybe it sits in the shadow of Sugar Mountain. We are, after all, watching a convoy of truckers make their way down a craggy pass into the valley below. Their bawdy chatter suggests, however, that we’ve aged out of the innocent world Young once described. If you can’t be 20 on Sugar Mountain, maybe you go to Linear Valley. Innocence and experience don’t take long to mingle in Human Highway. On the morning of the city’s annual talent show, the truckers recall a strip-tease routine still remembered a year later; they’re looking forward to this year’s event. The world’s last days sound like the last days at summer camp.

Linear Valley’s citizens — bumbling mechanic, Lionel; Lionel’s bemused but equally hapless pal, Fred (Tamblyn); restaurant proprietor, Little Otto⁵ (Stockwell), the recent heir to the family business; deranged short-order cook, Cracker (Dennis Hopper, reportedly not doing much acting); Kathryn (Sally Kirkland), a waitress who harbors showbiz dreams; her co-workers, Irene, grieving Otto Sr., and Charlotte (Charlotte Stewart), bristling at their new boss’ policy changes — live amid “the Gas Wars” in “a goddamn nuclear garden.” Nevertheless, the promise of the night’s talent show steals their attention and seems like it might set up a classic final-act bid to save Otto’s from corporate hands or keep the community center standing. Unbeknownst to them (or any Director’s Cut viewers going in cold), there won’t be a talent show to unite the town or elevate a lucky winner to stardom. We’ve just watched Linear Valley’s final sunrise.

Young added bumpers to Human Highway for the 2015 Director’s Cut, just in time for a brainless America First ideology to come back into style. The cheerful radio advertisements echo the post-9/11 world. Deejays tout the patriotism inherent in buying gas and slapping the flag on products. Warnings about radiation levels include neologisms right out of the War on Terror:

“The weather in the valley will be perfect today, a carbon copy of yesterday. Today’s Rad Count will stay well within the Linear Valley Regulatory Authority Green Zone of Acceptability, so go with the glow and enjoy your normal lives. This portion of Linear Valley Today is brought to you by Byrd⁶Gas: it’s good for the planet because Byrds make it.“

That reference to a Green Zone especially recalls the new kind of (allegedly data-driven) fearmongering that characterized life under George Dubya Bush. It’s all delivered with a smile that only fitfully disguises the grimace. A later reference to Freedom Bread sounds almost too much like it was beamed in from 2003. 

The ads and radio patter close at the top of the hour, “It’s six o’ clock in Linear Valley,” and the denizens of the Cal-Neva Nuclear Power Authority (The five founding members of Devo) ominously enter the frame, dressed identically and walking in lockstep. They’re Linear Valley’s version of the Riverbottom Nightmare Band, terrorizing citizens with their annual talent show victories. That’s just the most visible of their villainy. They’ve also been dumping nuclear waste dangerously close to Lionel and his pals in Linear Valley. During Human Highway’s early going, we cut back and forth between the goings-on in town and the Cal-Neva team’s approaching truckload of nuclear waste. Imagine Episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) intercut with a montage of the original television series’ most popular moments.

Related: Listen to Bennett Glace on Split Picks discussing Human Highway and Rust Never Sleeps

Lionel and Fred make an especially charming entrance. Peddling their bikes against rear-projected backdrops, they occasionally seem to float. Young proves a more-than-capable Jerry Lewis imitator. He’s good enough to make you wish he’d done more acting. Young’s buddy comedy routine with Tamblyn balances huge amounts of verbal and physical jokes. Lionel makes vaudevillian malaprops (“does radiation come from radiators?”) by the handful, and Fred falls flat on his face more than once. Young even makes a winning romantic lead. A shot-reverse-shot sequence between Kathryn and Lionel gives our co-director the chance to mug like a jackass. As shots of Mrs. Robinson (Mickey Fox), briefly distracted from her breakfast, intercede, Lionel gawps at his crush. Perhaps in response (or perhaps in Lionel’s mind alone), she blows a kiss, flutters her eyelashes, and seductively licks her lips. Each shot inspires a wide-eyed and bashful reaction from Lionel. Though his cartoonish infatuation grows more and more intense, he never evolves from Dr. Kelp to Buddy Love.⁷

During its most fanciful stretch, Human Highway returns to its original subject matter and takes aim at all manner of rockstar excesses and clichés. Young pulls double duty as Frankie Fontaine, a tight-lipped superstar who attracts hushed speculation while he freebases heroin in the back of his limo. When Fontaine’s car drops onto Lionel and knocks him out, we’re taken into the mechanic’s rocker fantasies where we witness several elegies for the era’s musicians and movie stars and their often risible behavior. A sequence where Young bathes in milk recalls a comment from Lionel’s romantic rival, Linear Valley’s muscular milk man (David Blue), and takes rockstar debauchery to a stomach-turning level. Young makes the regal excess of historical myth — aren’t some kings and queens said to have bathed in milk? — into something all too real and utterly unappealing. Even though he has morphed from mechanic to musician, Lionel doesn’t appear any less gawky or goofy. Holding his knees, he looks like an overgrown child while Charlotte pours milk down his body and sips it through a straw. We’re undoubtedly seeing the high life as imagined by one particular man-child. Booji Boy looks only mildly more ridiculous when he whines the lyrics to “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)” from a crib during the sequence’s climactic duet.

When Lionel comes to, the movie concludes with comical swiftness. Charlotte seems newly taken with Lionel and the unfazed mechanic throws himself back under the car to continue his work. The sight of Fred and the rest of the cast yanking him to safety provides one of the best gags in a film chock-full of them. Before anyone can say much more, the long-promised meltdown arrives. Booji Boy’s final message to the cast finds him echoing the KGLOW ads we’ve heard throughout the film, “You got any last-minute shopping to do, you better get it done now.” Nearly the entire cast of Human Highway (even the late Otto Sr.) then convenes for a show-stopping reprise of “Worried Man Blues.” Though most of the choreography is charmingly amateurish, Tamblyn gets a chance to show moves that not only recall his performances in musicals like The Fastest Gun Alive (1956) but also predict Dr. Jacoby’s shovel-selling grift in Twin Peaks: The Return.

The credits roll and Human Highway somehow retains its strangeness. Young and Stockwell list their cast of characters last. Though the gesture suggests, perhaps, an attempt to hide their shame from God, the scene that plays over the closing credits confirms they had no need. Lionel and company make their way up a staircase to the Pearly Gates with Fred saving time for one last pratfall. We’re left with instructions to “Look Out for Human Highway III.” It might read as just a joke from anyone else, but the ever-surprising Young could still have a few more tricks up his sleeve. Hell, the Director’s Cut gave us a Part II and Devo brought back “Worried Man Blues” just a few months ago for NPR.

Purchase Human Highway on Blu-ray from Neil Young’s Greedy Hand store

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1.  According to a version of events proffered by Elliot Roberts, Young’s long-time manager, and several members of Devo in Are We Not Men, it was Dennis Hopper who effectively co-directed the film with Young. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll refer to the film as Young’s alone from here on out. ↩︎
2.  This self-deprecating line comes from the liner notes of Decade (1977), a collection of Young hits released between ‘66 and ‘76. ↩︎
3.  Google the film and you’ll see a September 1982 release date listed, but McDonough says it made its Los Angeles premiere in June of 1983. ↩︎
4.  On page 553 of Shakey, McDonough quotes from Young, “Electronic music is a lot like folk music to me . . . it’s a new kind of rock and roll–it’s so synthetic and antifeeling that is a lot of feelings . . .” ↩︎
5.  It’s doubly disappointing to see Stockwell as the embodiment of money-hungry small business. Gone are both the child of Stars in My Crown (1950) and The Boy with Green Hair (1948) as well as the counter-cultural stalwart who drew the cover art for Young’s Zuma and might’ve worked the kitchen at Otto’s in another life. ↩︎
6.  Some evidence of the mean streak in Human Highway. ↩︎
7.  When I talked about Human Highway on an episode of Split Picks, I described Lionel as steadily turning into a “Tex Avery wolf” throughout this sequence. This is not at all the case. Lionel’s infatuation remains pretty chaste. ↩︎