Harry Thomason’ s The Last Ride follows country legend Hank Williams through the last three days of his life, on a long road trip from his hometown in Alabama through the mountains of Tennessee and West Virginia to a New Years Eve gig in Charleston, South Carolina. We ride along, seeing the world through eyes of the singer’s young driver, Silas (Jesse James) a mechanics assistant who gets the driver job when Williams’ old handler up and quits. The boy has never been away from home, and he has no idea who Williams is. That anonymity allows a friendship to slowly form through the haze of alcohol and cigarette smoke, Silas, in effect, carrying Williams on the final stretch on the road to death.
The pair never make it to the gig, nor do they make it to the New Years show in Ohio Williams is supposed to play. Instead they get waylaid by snow, stuck in a Tennessee court, and sidetracked by a drunken New Years Eve in a country bar. Henry Thomas plays Williams, who goes by the pseudonyms “Mr. Wells” and “Luke,” and his performance conjures nothing but a drunk lost somewhere behind an anonymous wall of inebriation. It’s one of things that doesn’t work about The Last Ride, a movie whose historical characters could be substituted with any joker off the street without loosing much of the shoddy action that crawls through the slow moving country roads. We’re supposed to supply our own knowledge and appreciation of Williams, to find Silas’ ignorance amusing, and Williams sage-like wisecracks pertinent because we know it’s the legend talking. And The Last Ride tries to take the legend and make him more human, but only makes Williams something of a cartoon, his life a chestnut.
