The Last Ride

The Last Ride is a 2011 independent film directed by Harry Thomason about the last days of country music legend Hank Williams, who died on January 1, 1953, at the age of twenty-nine. The movie was filmed in several Arkansas locations, mostly in Little Rock (Pulaski County) and North Little Rock (Pulaski County). The narrative differs somewhat from the historical account of Williams’s final days.

The movie opens with nineteen-year-old Silas Combs (Jesse James) being berated by the manager of the garage where he works, Ray (Stephen Tobolowsky). A man named Stan (Ray McKinnon) shows up with a new car that needs to be greased up for a trip north and inquires about hiring a driver, piquing Silas’s interest. (In real life, the driver was a college student named Charles Carr.) On December 30, 1952, Silas is introduced to Hank Williams (Henry Thomas), who is going under the name of Mr. Wells (later calling himself Luke), and is told that he is to ensure his passenger have no whiskey during the trip from Alabama to Charleston, West Virginia. Silas does not know the identity of his passenger. During the drive, Williams is in obvious ill health (he suffered from spina bifida) and behaves erratically, getting drunk and shooting at another vehicle with a revolver. A winter storm starts to move in, complicating their ride, and at their first stop, Williams meets a “doctor” for a “vitamin shot” and is insensible the next morning.

On the trip, Silas keeps Williams’s manager O’Keefe (Fred Thompson) updated about their progress via telephone. Williams encourages some reckless driving, leading them to be pulled over in Loudon County, Tennessee, and having to plea before a judge. They stop at the airport in Bristol, Virginia, and charter a plane, but are unable to land at Charleston and have to return to Bristol due to the storm. They proceed to drive again, and Silas calls O’Keefe, who tells them to redirect themselves toward a scheduled concert the next day in Canton, Ohio, saying he will be there waiting for them. On New Year’s Eve, a gas station attendant named Wanda (Kaley Cuoco, best known as Penny from the television series The Big Bang Theory) directs them to Dirty John’s Honky Tonk for a drink.

While at Dirty John’s, Williams gets into a fight with a woman’s ex-husband, and Silas intervenes. When Wanda shows up at Dirty John’s, Williams tells Silas to spend time with her while he sleeps in the car. They celebrate New Year’s Day at the bar, and Silas sleeps in the car, too, before they start again on their trip. Silas stops at a church to procure an ice scraper for the windshield, and sometime later, Silas discovers that Williams has died. O’Keefe arrives in the town where they have stopped and pays Silas, giving him the Cadillac he was driving, in accordance with a note left behind by Williams. Silas drives away, presumably back to Wanda.

A number of Arkansas actors aside from McKinnon make an appearance, including Natalie Canerday (a nurse), Graham Gordy (an attendant), and Rick Dial (Dirty John). Filming locations included the Argenta Historic District, the Mobil Gas Station in the Central High School Neighborhood Historic District, the covered bridge at Burns Park, the Old Mill, the Pulaski County Courthouse, downtown Benton (Saline County), Cotham’s Mercantile in Scott (Pulaski and Lonoke counties), the Roundtop Filling Station in Sherwood (Pulaski County), and the White Water Tavern.

The Last Ride was screened at the Nashville Film Festival and opened the Little Rock Film Festival in June 2011 before being released in seven Southern cities, including Little Rock, on October 21, 2011. It earned $27,000 at the box office.

The movie was not popular with most critics. Jeannette Catsoulis of the New York Times described it as a “dreary imagining of the final days in the troubled life of Hank Williams.” Peter Simek wrote that the movie’s “historical characters could be substituted with any joker off the street without loosing [sic] much of the shoddy action that crawls through the slow moving country roads.” Chuck Bowen complained that the movie resembled many of its genre: “The Last Ride is a typical wax-museum reproduction of the American South in which every detail is Southern in bold all caps, and not a single scene over the course of the film’s 102 minutes rings true.”

For additional information:
Bowen, Chuck. “Review: The Last Ride.” Slant Magazine, June 18, 2012. https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/the-last-ride/ (accessed June 10, 2026).

Catsoulis, Jeannette. “Hank Williams’s Swan Song.” New York Times, June 21, 2012. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/movies/the-last-ride-with-henry-thomas-as-hank-williams.html (accessed June 10, 2026).

Martin, Philip. “Last Ride Actor Averse to Impersonating Hank.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, October 21, 2011. https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2011/oct/21/last-ride-actor-averse-impersonating-hank-20111021/ (accessed June 10, 2026).

“The Last Ride.” Internet Movie Database. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1605803/ (accessed June 10, 2026).

Simek, Peter. “Movie Review: The Last Ride: On the Road to Nowhere with Hank Williams.” D Magazine, August 23, 2012. https://www.dmagazine.com/arts-entertainment/2012/08/movie-review-the-last-ride-on-the-road-to-nowhere-with-hank-williams/ (accessed June 10, 2026).

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas