STUDIOCANAL is thrilled to announce the release of David Lynch’s reflective and deeply compassionate The Straight Story on 4K UHD and Blu-ray on February 9. The film will also screen at BFI Southbank as part of the BFI’s upcoming season David Lynch: The Dreamer, with additional cinema dates from March 13, released by Park Circus.
Throughout the making of The Straight Story, Richard Farnsworth was gravely ill. Terminally diagnosed with bone cancer, he accepted the role out of deep admiration for the real-life Alvin Straight, delivering a performance of extraordinary gentleness and dignity under unimaginable physical strain. It would earn him an Academy Award nomination and stand as one of the most moving final performances in American cinema. Farnsworth passed away the following year.
Based on a true story, The Straight Story follows septuagenarian Alvin Straight as he journeys across America’s heartland on a ride-on lawnmower to reunite with his estranged brother. Shot along the same 260-mile route Alvin travelled in 1994, from Laurens, Iowa to Mt. Zion, Wisconsin the film moves at its own patient pace, allowing space for reflection, kindness, and connection. Along the way, Alvin meets strangers who briefly share his path, from a teenage runaway to a fellow World War II veteran, offering simple, hard-earned wisdom that quietly reshapes their lives.
There is something especially poignant, now, about revisiting this film in a world where David Lynch is also gone. It still feels strange (almost unreal) to speak of Lynch in the past tense. A filmmaker so singular, so endlessly curious about the mysteries beneath everyday life, somehow also made one of the quietest, most humane road movies ever put to screen.
With an aching, beautiful score by Angelo Badalamenti and a superb supporting cast including Sissy Spacek and Harry Dean Stanton, The Straight Story remains an unexpected departure within Lynch’s body of work, a film less concerned with the surreal than with the fundamental question it gently poses: “In life, what are the things that really matter?”
As a longtime admirer of this film, this release feels like a gift. It’s a chance to return to a work of rare tenderness from a filmmaker we continue to miss, and to celebrate a movie that reminds us, with extraordinary simplicity, how much grace can be found in slowing down.
