Road Scholar

Poet Andrei Codrescu, a popular commentator on National Public Radio, hits the road in this documentary that follows him from Manhattan to San Francisco. A Romanian immigrant who came to the US in 1966, Codrescu was commissioned by filmmaker Roger Weisberg to comment on modern America with the eyes of the old country looking at the new, and vice versa. Codrescu's sardonic quips are amusing in small doses but tend to wear thin; his flippancy overtakes his more deft observations long before the end of this brief film.

A lifelong nondriver, Codrescu learned to drive for this film, in which he would see America in the most mythic way possible: by driving coast to co...