script with John Roach, a childhood friend; the two retraced Straight's route in the process of writing. When Lynch saw the finished script he immediately took to it, saying "it became, for me, very real." Casting For the role of Alvin Straight, producers cast their first choice, Richard Farnsworth. Though he was reluctant to commit to the role as he was then terminally ill with metastatic prostate cancer, he took the role out of admiration for Straight. Sissy Spacek, a longtime friend of Lynch's who had helped to finance his earlier film Eraserhead, was cast as Alvin's daughter, Rose. Harry Dean Stanton was cast as Alvin's ailing brother. Filming The Straight Story was independently shot along the actual route taken by Straight, and all scenes were shot in chronological order in the autumn of 1998. Lynch would later call the film "my most experimental movie". During production, Farnsworth's cancer had spread to his bones, but he astonished his co-workers with his tenacity during production. The paralysis of his legs as shown in the film was real. Farnsworth died by suicide the following year, at the age of 80. The Straight Story was acquired by Walt Disney Pictures in the United States after a successful debut at Cannes and was given a G-rating by the MPAA (the only Lynch film to receive such a rating). Music The musical score for The Straight Story was composed by Angelo Badalamenti, continuing a 13-plus year collaboration with Lynch that began with Blue Velvet. A soundtrack album was released on October 12, 1999, by Windham Hill Records. Soundtrack All music composed and conducted by Angelo Badalamenti. Critical reception The Straight Story was critically acclaimed upon its release, with critics lauding Lynch's uncharacteristic subject matter. Entertainment Weekly described the film as a "celestial piece of Americana". The Chicago Tribune wrote of the film, "we see something American studio movies usually don't give us: the simple, unsentimentalized beauty of the rural American Midwestern landscape." Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote, "the same bellwether quality that left Blue Velvet looking so prescient, and ushered in a whole cinematic wave of taboo-shattering, is at work once again. When a born unnaturalist like Lynch can bring such interest and emotion to one man's simple story, the realm of the ordinary starts looking like a new frontier." Of Farnsworth's performance, Maslin wrote, "he automatically frees the film from any