If you’ve ever found yourself on the outside looking in, then you are probably familiar with the coping strategy of acquiring the identity of a movie character in order to gain legibility within the situation. The central character of Jenni Olson’s mesmerizing essay film is a gender dysphoric, Midwestern tomboy who is drawn to borrowing masculine personas from Hollywood characters as a mode of understanding how to deal with being drawn to unavailable women. A fascinating and unlikely reinvention story, The Royal Road simultaneously explores cinematic spiritual channeling, the conquest and colonization of Mexico and the American Southwest, fading historical Californian urban landscapes, and the passions found in butch identity to achieve an achingly beautiful and poetic defense of remembering. Probing roads from El Camino Real, to the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, to the road right outside the front door, Olson crafts a deeply intelligent and transcending observation of the human condition that reaches for redemption in the embrace of history, nostalgia, mindfulness, and sheer beauty. If you give yourself over to it, it will crack you wide open.

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Summer in Berlin. Jonas is planning a trip through the little known area of the Uckermark in preparation for a photography project. He invites his best friend, Phillip, to come along. They haven’t met since the time they spent together in London. So they pack up their Mercedes camper and take off across uncharted territory, stopping whenever they see something they like, taking pictures and generally enjoying a laid-back road trip. The fact that Phillip is gay has never been an issue for either of them. When they pick up a hitchhiker named Boris, however, who shows Jonas some interesting spots and starts to make moves on Phillip, the friendship of the two starts to fray. Maybe three’s a crowd after all? By the end of the summer, things between Jonas and Phillip won’t ever be the same again.

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