The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) Review: Before Che Was Che

Is The Motorcycle Diaries worth watching?

Yes. The Motorcycle Diaries is one of the finest road movies of the 2000s, a warm and gorgeously photographed journey that captures the moment a restless young man starts to see the world differently. Walter Salles makes the continent itself a character, and Gael García Bernal plays the future Che Guevara as a curious, awkward, deeply decent student rather than a poster. The reservation is that the film’s admiration occasionally tips into reverence, and it deliberately avoids the harder questions about the man he became.

What is The Motorcycle Diaries about?

The Motorcycle Diaries is set in 1952. Ernesto Guevara (Gael García Bernal), a 23-year-old medical student from Buenos Aires with chronic asthma, sets off with his older friend Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna), a biochemist, on an ancient, overloaded motorbike they call La Poderosa, “the mighty one”.

Their plan is a months-long adventure across South America, through Argentina, Chile and Peru, with the idea of eventually working at a leper colony in the Amazon. They set out as two young men chasing girls, free meals and a good story. Along the way, as the motorbike falls apart and they continue on foot and by lorry, they meet miners, farmers, indigenous communities and patients whose poverty they cannot unsee. Mía Maestro appears as Chichina, the well-off girlfriend Ernesto leaves behind.

Salles directs from a screenplay by José Rivera, adapted from Guevara’s own travel memoir and Granado’s account. The film is in Spanish, runs 126 minutes and is an Argentine-led international co-production.

A friendship that carries the film

Before it is a political story, this is a buddy comedy, and the chemistry between the two leads is its engine. De la Serna’s Alberto is the joker and schemer, forever talking his way into hospitality, while García Bernal’s Ernesto is compulsively honest, even when honesty is inconvenient. Their bickering and loyalty feel completely unforced, and the early episodes, full of breakdowns, flirtations and misadventures, are genuinely funny.

García Bernal’s performance is quietly remarkable. He plays Ernesto’s transformation not as a series of speeches but as a gradual change in how he listens and watches, so that by the later stages of the journey the character’s seriousness seems to have grown out of everything we have seen.

The continent as teacher

Eric Gautier’s cinematography gives the journey a sweeping, tactile beauty: Patagonian lakes, windswept Andean passes, the Atacama desert and the ruins of Machu Picchu. Yet Salles never lets the landscapes become a travel brochure. The encounters along the road, especially with a Chilean mining couple and with Peruvian villagers, are staged with documentary-like simplicity, and some feature non-professional performers whose faces carry the film’s argument better than any dialogue.

Gustavo Santaolalla’s spare guitar score and Jorge Drexler’s Oscar-winning song “Al otro lado del río” add to the gentle, reflective mood.

Where admiration becomes reverence

The film is candid about its point of view: it is a portrait of an idealist being formed, and it stops long before the revolutionary and the violence that followed. That is a legitimate choice, but it means the later stretches lean towards hagiography, with Ernesto’s goodness underlined in ways that feel more like tribute than drama. The episodic structure also means some encounters are more vivid than others.

Who should watch The Motorcycle Diaries?

It suits viewers who love road movies, coming-of-age stories and Latin American biography and landscape on a grand scale. You do not need to know or admire Guevara to enjoy it, though some knowledge of what came later adds poignancy. There is some language and brief sexual content but little violence, making it suitable for older teenagers.

Good companions:

• Central Station, Salles’s earlier Brazilian road movie, another journey that becomes an awakening.
• Y Tu Mamá También, in which García Bernal takes another road trip through a country’s social divides.
• I’m Still Here, Salles’s later film, which faces Latin American political history more directly.

The verdict

The Motorcycle Diaries is a humane, beautifully made road movie about how travel and friendship can change a young person’s sense of the world. Its reverence for Guevara limits its complexity, but the warmth of its lead performances and the grandeur of its journey make it a deeply rewarding watch.

Rating: 4.5/5