I have not seen this movie in many years, but had the opportunity to see it up on the big screen recently. It still holds up after all these years. The story is that a couple of New York kids are driving to Southern California to start graduate school and they choose to drive through the American South. The casual assumptions about the rural South are remarkable, and given how we are reexamining our treatment of blacks in the post-slavery South right now, it is sobering how causally it is assumed that everyone will be treated differently and unfairly if they are not a Southerner. The premise is that the scales of justice have fingers on them tilted in favor of the status quo, and in the movie that is a comedic element of tension, but in real life almost 30 years after the movie was made it doesn't seem so funny. The scenario is that the two boys get pulled over for what they believe to be inadvertent shop lifting (one of them slipped a can of tuna in his pocket without thinking--or paying--for it, but what they are actually in trouble for is murder. The ramshackle rush to judgment is both believable (they do fit the description) and without critical examination. There are many good lessons in here and it is well worth watching with 2020 eyes.
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