American Graffiti is set in the evening before best friends and recent high school graduates, Curt Henderson and Steve Bolander. They are scheduled to leave town to head to college back east. They spend one final night cruising the strip with their buddies before they go off to college. Meanwhile...
A brilliant work of popular art, it redefined nostalgia as a marketable commodity and established a new narrative style, with locale replacing plot, that has since been imitated to the point of ineffectiveness.
There is brilliant interplaying and underplaying, of script, performers and direction which will raise howls of laughter from audiences, yet never descends on the screen to overdone mugging, pratfall and other heavy-handed devices normally employed.
This superb and singular film catches not only the charm and tribal energy of the teen-age 1950s but also the listlessness and the resignation that underscored it all like an incessant bass line in one of the rock-'n'-roll songs of the period.
