At once generic and highly specific, “On the Road” is an ill-considered English title for a starkly distinctive genre workout from Mexican writer-director David Pablos — one that will surprise any viewers showing up expecting another Jack Kerouac adaptation. At least in the obvious ways. In others, however, Pablos’ fifth feature shares in the great North American storytelling tradition of the blacktop, with the limitless directions it affords to unmoored souls. Following a world-weary trucker and an impetuous gay hitcher as they form a dangerous, increasingly intimate bond along the roads and roadhouses of north Mexico, the film steers a straightforward premise into surprisingly fraught emotional territory, revealing a dark, bruised heart beneath a callused surface.
Pablos broke through in 2015 with “The Chosen Ones,” a rigorous, unforgiving sex-trafficking study that premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes and topped Mexico’s industry-leading Ariel Awards that year, but was perhaps too despairing to make much theatrical headway. His 2020 queer drama “Dance of the 41,” meanwhile, enjoyed a global Netflix release but a lower festival profile. Hard-edged but with a hard-earned warmth to it, with Diego Luna among its producers, “On the Road” could crack the international arthouse market after a brace of key wins at Venice: best film in the festival’s Horizons competition and the Queer Lion for best LGBT film across all program sections. Queer-friendly distributors in particular should take interest in a taut work with ample, frank and frankly hot sex scenes that may deter more genteel buyers.
It begins in medias res with a harsh image that signals the film’s style of forthright confrontation: a delicate twentysomething man cowed and kneeling in the flat, bleached desert, doused in gasoline and on the verge of being set alight. He is Veneno (Victor Prieto), a hustler who seems to live permanently on the edge of ruin. With seemingly no home or family to speak of, he makes a scant living servicing male truck drivers at various pitstops dotted across Mexico’s great dry nowhere. It’s a fluorescent netherworld of highwayside diners, cantinas and grimy sex dens, characterized equally by brutish hyper-masculinity and gruffly tacit queer yearning. Shot by DP Ximena Amann with a glistening sheen of sweat atop otherwise arid, neon-lit compositions, this milieu is vivid and volatile enough to imbue even expected plot turns with tingly uncertainty.
Veneno may serve a purpose to lonely, undiscriminating truckers in need of some fleeting company, but he’s still an outsider in their realm, vulnerable to violence and exploitation. After one john stiffs him, leaving him high and dry, he’s offered a ride by Muñeco (Osvaldo Sanchez), who’s a touch more kindly than most of his trucker brethren. Middle-aged and ostensibly straight, with a wife and children he sees rarely if ever, Muñeco has no issue with the young lad’s sexuality or livelihood. Indeed, the longer they travel together, it seems he’s a little more than fine with those things.
A budding attraction between the two men is clear but also bound in thorny ambiguities. Whether Veneno sees in Muñeco a father figure, a daddy or simply a mark with access to cash and drugs is an ongoing point of tension in proceedings, as is Muñeco’s own internal wrestling with his emotions, as his hetero patriarchal identity floats ever farther from his current existence. And that’s before other, more standard neo-noir complications crowd in on Pablos’ tight, terse script: gun-toting ghosts from Veneno’s past, and the long arm of the law following one rash, fatal truck-stop altercation.
As such, “On the Road” functions with brisk efficiency as a thriller on the surface, but is most knotty and compelling as a study of compromised queer bonding and cornered masculinity in a hyper-macho blue-collar environment — a conflict that results in all the visceral blood-letting you might expect, but a good deal of quiet tenderness that you don’t.
Sanchez’s expressively contained performance is built on that contrast, while acting as a sturdy, stoic counterpoint to Prieto’s more wired, reckless presence on screen. Their unpredictable push-pull chemistry — not just illustrated but articulated by their onscreen sexual encounters — is the film’s primary fuel, powering it through crime-movie tropes that might not otherwise stir much feeling. “On the Road” is unusually both hormonal and hard-boiled, hot-blooded while clinging to a core of sangfroid.