Larry Bensky is host of KPFA's Sunday Salon. "An endlessly fascinating portrait of late-1980s attitudes...an extraordinary fluidly shaped mosaic of the fragmented pockets of American life that together compose the mainstream."-Caryn James, N.Y. Times After years of voluntary exile in Europe Kramer returned to the U.S. to shoot this very personal, visually articulate statement on America-not the one he left, but the one he finds. The filmmaker and his protagonist, Doc (of Doc's Kingdom, again played by Paul McIsaac), follow the old Route 1 that runs from Key West to Canada-once the most traveled road in the world, now "a thin stretch of asphalt cutting through all the old dreams of a nation." In Doc's encounters over five months, countless vignettes unfold, stories of fishermen and industrialists, soldiers and priests. Poignant portraits of what once was are told in decaying blue-collar communities, in the emerging New South and the condition of its minorities. But Kramer said, "I had the impression that we were not driving through the past at all, but through a much more honest and dynamic revelation of the present...surrounded by big trouble and hard times."