Which is what Burt Munro, played by Anthony Hopkins, a New Zealander pushing 70, sets out to do. To break the speed record in the deserts of Utah in the United States, parts of the world that are these days the location for many a World’s Greatest Stunt Videos clip. His accomplice, and the object of his boundless affection, is a 1920 Indian motorcycle. As we find out quite early on in the movie, the bike is a charming accoutrement to the man, a channel for him to sublimate the loneliness and the questions of mortality that often stare people in the face as they grow old.  

Right from the start, the movie captures the dreamy nature of what its protagonist wants to achieve and incorporates this into its own feel. Many of the story’s characters are sympathetic to his cause, and often indulge him. There is an acrimonious scene, for instance, at the beginning of the movie where he stares a biker gang right in the face as he challenges them to a face-off, which somehow ends up in them offering him a smile and a few bucks to help him along his journey. The viewer is constantly asked to make such allowances as the movie progresses, and there are points in time when situations seem to crop up and then resolve themselves quite magically. 

Some of the most intense, and interesting, moments in the movie happen on the inside of the bike. When Monroe talks about pistons and titanium and V-Twin engines, he is purposeful and sure of himself. At these times, the movie itself becomes sure-footed and more purposeful. Hopkins nails the role of the tired old man who still wants to have it in him to give it one last shot with the seasoned excellence we have come to expect of him. Considering his own advancing age, you wonder how much of a performance like this, which calls for him to constantly highlight what comes with being old, is drawn naturally. He certainly gets inside the skin of this character: there is some self-doubt, there is a little geriatric verbosity, there is some forgetfulness, there is a little deafness even. The dialogue is peppered with the kind of wry lines (“If you don’t go where you wanna go, when you do go you’ll find you’re gone”) that a younger person couldn’t bring himself to think, much less say, for fear of a jinx.  

The bulk of movie lumbers through Munro’s journey from New Zealand to his race at Utah. Much of this is tedious, and I had a niggling feeling about the characters and the situations they brought with them. Strictly speaking, each of them did highlight yet another facet of the odds that a 70 year old, for-all-purposes penniless man had to overcome in order to get where he wanted to go. Which was exactly the problem. This wasn’t a case of deus ex machina in the classical sense, in that they didn’t exactly all swoop in and solve Monroe’s ever-mounting list of problems, but they did appear at seemingly random points during the movie, just as it was veering off-course, and try to inject a sudden dose of interest and direction into it. Often, these attempts are clunky. A scene that comes to mind immediately is one in which Munro gives a ride to a uniformed 20 year old man. It turns out that he is in the army and has been in Vietnam (the movie is set in the late 60s), and predictably, we are given an anti-war discourse. 

Still, Hopkins in his portrayal of a man who is aware of his vulnerabilities but yet looks them in the eye and fights them is endearing, and his performance and the character he plays will stay in memory long after the bones one might pick with the movie are forgotten.