As someone whose first airplane experience was a slightly traumatic flight from Amsterdam to Minneapolis not long after 9/11, it was a perplexing experience to soak in the space-age glory of John Travolta’s directorial debut Propeller One-Way Night Coach. Born out of his deep-rooted love for aviation, the honorary Palme d’Or recipient at this year’s Cannes Film Festival has sculpted a tender road movie — or rather, air movie — about his own formative plane journey. Clocking in at a brisk 61 minutes, this adaptation of Travolta’s eponymous 1997 children’s book is soon to be dropped on Apple TV+. At best, then, the deeply personal passion project of the star actor-turned-one-time director can be described as a little Cannes snack. Its inclusion in the official selection might make hardcore cinephiles scoff, pointing at the meandering narrative structure, somewhat subpar acting, and anecdotal voiceover Travolta deploys for his nostalgia-tinged ode to the splendor of being airborne in the halcyon days of postwar America. Nonetheless, the apparent amateurism and overt sentimentalism shouldn’t be taken for granted entirely.
Once you accept Propeller One-Way Night Coach‘s peculiar dream logic, Travolta’s film actually plays perfectly fine. Much like the soothing sound of the propeller engines that carry the young boy Jeff (Clark Shotwell) and his single mom Helen (Kelly Eviston-Quinnett) across the country to Los Angeles, the film immediately draws you in, only to release you from its comforting embrace once the end credits roll. Its charming qualities can mostly be ascribed to Travolta’s genuine unpretentiousness. With a soothing voiceover, he captures the boundless excitement of a kid who can’t believe his long-held dream is becoming reality before his very eyes. The actor-director has zero literary aspirations beyond earnestly capturing the wonders of a cherished childhood memory. As a more niche cousin of Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical The Fabelmans (2022), Propeller One-Way Night Coach similarly explores how a childhood obsession steered Travolta toward a career of moving people with his iconic screen presence and transporting gaze.
To speak of late-style auteurism is perhaps uncalled for in the case of a screen legend who has never made a film before. And still, Propeller One-Way Night Coach perfectly scratches the film buff’s late-auteurist itch. Its distinctive digital imagery gives an artificial sheen to a cozy aesthetic that relishes the vibrant analog warmth of the ’60s. Add to that a stubbornly linear narration — so reverential and even slightly demented in its recollection of the good old days — and it turns Travolta into the rare dilettante who, unlike many of his more reputable filmmaker colleagues, actually conjures something unique on the Croisette.
Populating the soundtrack with golden oldies by Frank Sinatra, João Gilberto, and Barbra Streisand, Propeller One-Way Night Coach largely lets the planes do the talking. In lieu of plot there’s mostly the marvel of Jeff, whose boyish gaze easily gets overwhelmed by how dowright cool all of this is to him. To be able to drink Coca-Cola and eat hot dogs thousands of feet up in the air, to make a new likemindedly nerdy friend, to immediately fall in love with a hot stewardess — played by Travolta’s daughter Ella Bleu, which can admittedly feel a little gross — these are the strongest narrative beats in an almost entirely frictionless screenplay.
Darker connotations, however, inevitably arise, as Propeller One-Way Night Coach gives you ample time to drift off into thoughts of your own, much like Jeff does above the clouds. “We used to be a country,” Travolta seems to say with his wide-eyed ode to proudly American companies that offered high-grade, low-cost services. While highly simplistic in this apolitical rhetoric, the film nonetheless flies in the face of late capitalist enshittification. As a gifted actor, passionate pilot, and incidentally great director, Travolta laments a world that, especially after 9/11, simply has ceased to exist. We have to go back, Travolta reminds his audience with this peculiar debut — but the childlike nostalgia, touchingly recounted from the perspective of an old man, also acknowledges that the best of times are often doomed to remain in the past. With this little movie, Travolta has tried to resurrect them to the best of his abilities, far exceeding any of the expectations a skeptic might have brought to this cinematic aviation curiosa.
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