Superficially, Lynch would seem an odd choice for the Straight story--no cast-off ears, no mutant babies, just an aging man's leisurely travels through a countryside rippling with wheat and sun. But Alvin Straight's trek across a middle America that's both benignly inhabited and unspoiled taps into the unironic conservatism at the heart of Lynch's work. With their cancerous depiction of sex and sin, Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks were a Boy Scout's vision of America in peril: The director's surreal, oddly retro style obscured a very real fear of monsters advancing on Main Street from the inside.

Though anything but perverse, The Straight Story (a telling title) fits surprisingly well with those works. If Lynch's earlier films are about the threat of corruption, the new movie is a testament to the square, corny, and utterly essential values that corruption endangers. Lynch sets the stubborn Straight and his quixotic quest against the backdrop of a vanishing rural tradition; he builds a kind of spatial comedy by juxtaposing Straight's putt-putt pace and dinky vehicle with the bigger, faster machines all around him. But the small but heartfelt kindnesses he encounters--from a suburban family, from a teary-eyed veteran--are linked to a bygone, prewar age of manners and ideals. Mortality is a mournful melody in the background of every scene.

The movie is least successful when it tries hardest to be "Lynchian"--in a stilted, bumptious encounter with two feuding brother mechanics, or a shrill scene involving a motorist who's hit a deer. (The payoff to that scene, though, is very funny, very odd, and very un-Disney-like.) Here, the quirks are allowed to overtake the characters, but what's most winning about this Lynch film is its insistence on the humanity of people who talk, live, and act differently--witness the empathetic handling of Sissy Spacek's startling role as Alvin's emotionally scarred, speech-impaired daughter.