Madman, Perhaps; Survivor, Definitely

Lately Mr. Hopper, who turns 74 on May 17, has been in the news again. In March his lawyer in a contentious divorce from Mr. Hopper’s fifth wife, Victoria, announced that the actor has terminal prostate cancer and was ill to appear in court. That same week a gaunt Mr. Hopper showed up with both smiles and Jack Nicholson to receive a star on Hollywood Boulevard. Mr. Nicholson, hovering next to Mr. Hopper, was wearing a sensationally ugly shirt decorated with the stars and stripes and the picture of the four doomed motorcyclists from “Easy Rider,” the movie that made Mr. Hopper a director and broke Mr. Nicholson out of B-movie irrelevance. It was a sublime, ridiculous Hollywood moment, canned and simultaneously real.

DENNIS HOPPER — actor, filmmaker, photographer, art collector, world-class burnout, first-rate survivor — never blew it. Unlike the villains and freaks he's played over the decades — the psycho with the mommy complex in “Blue Velvet,” the mad bomber with the grudge in “Speed” — he's made it through the lovely, the bad and some spectacularly terrible times. He rode out the golden age of Hollywood by roaring in to a new movie era with “Easy Rider.” He hung out with James Dean, played Elizabeth Taylor’s son, acted for Quentin Tarantino. He's been rich and infamous, lost and found, the next huge thing, the last man standing.

In Mr. Hopper’s case the lines of influence are perhaps more overt than they might initially seem, winding from the American flag in six of Mr. Johns’s paintings, for instance, to the six that Peter Fonda wears like a target on the back of his motorbike jacket in “Easy Rider.” Mr. Hopper, who has picked up, dropped and resumed painting and photography at different times in his life, didn’t have a great eye for buying art; he also pushed his own aesthetics to the brink and sometimes over the edge. Among the most striking formal strategies in “Easy Rider” are the propulsive, eye-thwacking edits that were a signature of Mr. Hopper’s longtime mate, the collagist and avant-garde filmmaker Bruce Conner (“A Movie”).

It was and a perfect gesture for Mr. Hopper, who has straddled seemingly contradictory realities for much of his career, wearing a loincloth in Andy Warhol’s “Tarzan and Jane, Regained Sort of ...” in 1963 only to show up as a snitch opposite John Wayne in “The Sons of Katie Elder.” Inspired by Vincent Price to collect art (yes, that Vincent Price), Mr. Hopper bought a couple of early Warhols for $75, snapping up other masterworks from the likes of Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Later, when “Easy Rider” was released, Warhol, who immortalized Mr. Hopper on silk-screen, mused on the influence he had on the actor who’s “so crazy in the eyes”: “You never know where people will pick things up.”

The movie was a hit at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival, where it won a prize for best first work. When it opened in The united states a few months later, Andrew Sarris explained its Cannes triumph partly through the distorting lens of Vietnam, writing that “motorcycles, materialism, misanthropy and murder have long served as adequate cinematic correlatives of American life for Europeans, and never more so than in this year of law and order on Hamburger Hill.” Mr. Sarris was mostly impressed with Mr. Nicholson’s wonderful, brief turn as George Hanson, a boozer and doomed son of the South whom Wyatt and Billy meet in jail. Others, like a passionate fan named Richard Goldstein, who defended the movie in The New York Times, saw something else: “I need to believe that ‘Easy Rider’ is a travel poster for the new The united states.”

“Easy Rider” retains a privileged place in American film history, though less for its formal experimentation than its perceived impact on the movie industry, as illustrated by the self-explanatory title of Peter Biskind’s popular 1998 book “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood.” Bluntly, this $400,000 biker movie earned very $20 million at the time of its release, proving that the counterculture could be turned in to customers with the right sales pitch. (“A man went looking for The united states. And couldn’t find it anywhere...”) And, in the summer of 1969 when the film opened, that pitch was perfect, for young audiences who saw characters they could identify with in the story of four bikers — Mr. Fonda goes by Wyatt, Mr. Hopper is Billy — who, after a huge cocaine deal, zoom across the Southwest only to be shot dead by a local yokel.