The 1969 film starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper that featured “Born to Be Wild” was Easy Rider.
Fonda and Hopper play Wyatt and Billy, two motorcyclists traveling across the United States after making money from a cocaine deal. The film was written by Fonda, Hopper, and Terry Southern, directed by Hopper, and produced by Fonda. Jack Nicholson delivers a memorable supporting performance as the alcoholic lawyer George Hanson.
Easy Rider became a defining film of the late 1960s counterculture. Its road-trip structure explores freedom, communal living, drug use, and the tension between outsiders and conservative America. The low-budget production was shot in a loose, location-based style that helped make it a landmark of the New Hollywood era.
The Steppenwolf recording of “Born to Be Wild” is strongly associated with the film and helped popularize the phrase “heavy metal thunder,” although the movie’s soundtrack also includes music by The Byrds, The Band, Jimi Hendrix Experience, and others. The song is often treated as a motorcycle anthem, but Easy Rider’s soundtrack uses several existing recordings rather than a conventional orchestral score.