After his low-budget Easy Rider became an instant countercultural phenomenon and massive box-office hit, Dennis Hopper was given carte blanche to go to Peru and make his passion project, an experimental Western entitled The Last Movie. After a year in post-production, the resulting effort met with such scathing backlash that Hopper spent the decade in professional semi-exile. The American Dreamer, helmed by Lawrence Schiller and the late L.M. Kit Carson (star of David Holzman’s Diary), charts the period when Hopper, back from South America with reams of footage, holed up in Taos, New Mexico, and endeavored to piece together a masterpiece. A revealing portrait of the freedom and excess of the New Hollywood and of a man whose name is synonymous with both.