Sightlines · a viewing thread

Misfits on the American Backroads

A run of journeys across the American map, each hauling someone who doesn't fit — a con man and his maybe-daughter, a losing family in a yellow bus, two outlaws outrunning the century, and a pair of lovers who eat people — watch them near each other and the road itself starts to feel like the family.

Mostly warm, accessible Americana anchored by a bona fide crowd-pleaser and a canonical Western, so it's an easy night for almost anyone — just save Bones and All for when you can take real tenderness laced with real gore.

• Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
• Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
• Paper Moon (1973)
• Bones and All (2022)
• Nebraska (2013) — The overlooked one that rhymes hardest with Paper Moon and Little Miss Sunshine — a stubborn old man dragging his son across the black-and-white plains toward an imaginary sweepstakes million, the road slowly becoming the only family left.
• O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) — If Butch Cassidy's outlaw camaraderie landed, this is the Depression-era chain-gang odyssey to finally pull down — three mismatched misfits winding across Mississippi, warm Americana with a tall-tale grin.
• Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) — The under-seen drifter picture to admit alongside these — two near-wordless gearheads hustling their way across the Southwest in a stripped '55 Chevy, where the highway itself quietly stands in for home and family.