08-03-2025
The apocalyptic cult film that sent Neil Young on a freaky Hollywood acid trip
Neil Young has long been drawn to the road less travelled, never more so than in his bizarre 1982 art-house movie Human Highway. Credited with inspiring David Lynch's Twin Peaks and the cartoon-like early work of director Tim Burton, the film, about a small-town diner obliterated in a nuclear war, is a wild swing even by the standards of Young – whose Eighties period also included a public falling out with Geffen Records, which sued him for making music 'uncharacteristic' of his classic sound.
Young has gone on the bigger (and stranger) things in the intervening decades. Just this year, heritage rock's once-and-future curmudgeon had a 24-hour falling out with the hallowed Glastonbury Festival. As was widely reported, he withdrew from the event before he had even been announced as a headliner, claiming the BBC's involvement was a 'corporate turn-off'. The following day, he had inevitably changed his mind and will top the bill during the festival's prestigious Saturday night slot.
This week, he again goes 'full Neil Young' by releasing a new album, Oceanside Countryside, which was, in fact, recorded in 1977. It's an instant classic, combining beautifully pastoral songwriting, rambling guitar solos and blissful Seventies melodies. Why it has remained in the vault for nearly 50 years is a question nobody – Young, least of all – has a straightforward answer for. In Neil Young's world, things happen in their own good time.
In the case of Human Highway – also, and seemingly entirely by coincidence, the name of a track on Oceanside Countryside – the creative process took four years, on and off. Young funded the $3 million budget entirely from his own pocket and worked in collaboration with a loose ensemble of LA friends, including actors Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn and Dennis Hopper – then deep in the throes of addiction (his daily regime included three grams of cocaine and up to 30 beers).
Young had some experience directing music videos, and for Human Highway, went for a super-saturated, hyper-realistic look one review likened to 'The Wizard of Oz on Acid'. The colours pop off too brightly; the actors deliver their lines with the same flat affect Lynch would employ on Twin Peaks. At one point, Young rides a stationary bike against what is clearly a green screen backdrop. Weirdest of all – and that is saying a lot – is the presence of the art-rock band Devo, who play a radiation clean-up crew and who glow with a chintzy red halo.
All signed up on the strength of Young's reputation. It certainly wasn't because of his skills as a storyteller. The cameras started rolling without a finished script, and much of the dialogue was improvised (further contributing to the surreal vibes). All Young knew was that he wanted a film that looked unlike anything else on the screen. He was also keen on a starring role for himself – a bucket-list item he ticked off with enthusiasm in playing the goofball Lionel Switch, a man-child mechanic who cannot drive, is ignorant about cars and dreams of being a rock star.
Human Highway is set in a gas station diner in fictional 'Linear Valley' on the eve of a nuclear apocalypse. Young's Lionel spends his days dreamily mucking about with his even more clueless pal Fred (Tamblyn). The villain of the piece is Stockwell's Otto – the new owner of the diner and garage who wants to turn around his later father's failing business and hatches a plan to torch the building and claim the insurance.
In the background lurks (a visibly three-sheets-to-the-wind) Hopper as a demonic short-order chef Cracker, while Charlotte Stewart, who starred in Lynch's Eraserhead, is one of a trio of waitresses functioning as a Greek chorus. They are later joined by Devo, whose leader, Booji Boy, is a nightmare figure with the plastic face of a child and a squeaky voice. Young then pops up again in the secondary role of music mogul Frankie Fontaine. His visit to the gas station sends Lionel into a dreamlike reverie in which he and Devo perform Young's Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black) in a punk club, with lead vocals by the terrifying Booji Boy (Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh).
Having returned to reality, Lionel joins the rest of the diner's employees in performing a ritualised dance with shovels before nuclear war erupts and the world ends. 'It was ridiculous to explain it, and we had no script,' Young would acknowledge.
If it sounds insane on paper, the film is even more bizarre up on the screen. Demonstrating considerable skill as a director, Young gives the action an eerie, artificial sheen. The set – purpose-built on a sound stage at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood – looks like a child's playroom refracted through an acid trip. Hopper's Cracker is a growling precursor of the wheezing gangster he portrayed in Lynch's Blue Velvet. There are constant cuts to a spaceship modelled on a Native American tribal carving and which has nothing to do with the plot.
The zaniness came with a darker side, however. Inevitably, the agent of chaos was the unpredictable Hopper. One morning, he took a fancy to his chef's knife– to the alarm of cast mate Sally Kirkland, who played another of the waitresses.
'Dennis kept throwing this knife into the wall, then going up to the prop man to ask him to sharpen it—yeah, that got me nervous,' recalled Kirkland in an interview with Flood Magazine. 'I asked Neil to ask Dennis not to do this, but Dennis persisted. When I went over to talk to him while he was playing with the knife, I reached up, his hand went down, and he cut my first finger and tore a tendon.'
Young advised that Kirkland sue the production – strange counsel, given that he was ultimately bankrolling the entire endeavour. He encouraged Hopper to straighten out – which he did after a stint in rehab. 'Dennis and I made amends,' said Kirkland. 'He even played my husband in [Edtv].'
While Dennis Hopper was chugging beers, hoovering cocaine, and playing with knives, the members of Devo were in a state of disbelief. As products of the American Midwest punk scene, they came from an entirely different world to that inhabited by Young and his Hollywood pals. They truly were not in Ohio anymore.
'I grew up listening to Neil Young, and after the shootings at Kent State, I used to lay around in my apartment and listen to After the Gold Rush,' guitarist Bob Casale would say, referring to the campus shooting by state troopers that would inspire Young's Ohio. 'And suddenly I was getting to write and block out a five-minute piece with Devo, as disgruntled nuclear waste workers in Linear Valley, shooting at Raleigh Studios with 35mm film, and probably cost more per hour than I ever got to use, ever… It was just incredible.'
Incredible it may have been but Human Highway was also wacky in the extreme and met with bafflement on its release. For years afterwards, it was considered a lost artefact. However, it gained a cult audience when it finally appeared on VHS in 1995. Then, in 2014, a restored cut was released by Young – who spoke proudly of the project at the Toronto Film Festival, where it was heralded as 'a thermonuclear reminder of the crazy, chaotic energy to be found at the end of the road'.
Introducing Human Highway at a screening, Young took the opportunity to finally explain its meaning. It wasn't about the environment or nuclear power. It was, he said, a warning against fixating on the little things in life and ignoring the bigger picture.
The inhabitants of Linear Valley were guilty of 'complacency of things that were weird they just lived with, that they just kept ignoring and ignoring until finally it just couldn't be ignored anymore', he elaborated. The moral was that we need to pay attention to the world around us – and to call out wrongdoing when we see it rather than pretend it doesn't exist. In 2025, as Young prepares to headline Glastonbury, that message is surely more relevant than
