There are many moments in Gasoline Rainbow, the teen road trip drama directed by Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross, that defy classification into either fiction or reality. It’s shot as if an unseen member of the friend group at the core of the film is holding a camera at all times, swinging it around inside a cramped van, jerking it from side to side as they run down empty highways and flat fields. Following today’s teens’ first steps into the wide world of adulthood, Gasoline Rainbow is a melancholy, meandering road movie for a generation on the precipice.

The film is led by a group of five first-time actors, three boys and two girls, playing high school seniors about to graduate from the world they knew and leave their homes for higher education. Having grown up in a small town in the middle of the Oregon flatlands, they’ve never seen the Pacific coast, so they pile into their friend’s van and set off down the........

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