Peter Farrelly · 2018 · road

The 2018 film, based on a true 1962 concert tour. A Black classical pianist hires a white working-class driver to take him through the Jim Crow South, navigating by the Green Book that listed the few places that would serve them. The route from New York deep into the segregated South and home again traces both a real itinerary and the slow growth of an unlikely friendship.

1. 1
   New York

   The Copacabana closes for renovations and a bouncer out of work takes a driving job - eight weeks south with a Black classical pianist who has chosen to tour the places least likely to want him.

2. 2
   Pittsburgh

   The tour rolls west and south through the Midwest, the two men wary strangers thrown together in a cramped car.

3. 3
   Louisville

   Kentucky, and the tour turning south - the point on the itinerary where the Green Book stops being a curiosity in the glovebox and starts being the thing that decides where Shirley is allowed to sleep.

4. 4
   Macon

   Georgia, and a concert hall that wants him on its stage and will not let him use its lavatory - the contradiction the whole film is built on, stated plainly and without any softening.

5. 5
   Memphis

   Tennessee, and the long drives between engagements where most of the film actually happens: two men in a car, the radio, the arguments about fried chicken and about letters home.

6. 6
   Birmingham

   Deep in Alabama the indignities mount, the green book guiding them to the only inns that will take Shirley, until they refuse to play one last humiliating venue.

7. 7
   New York

   They drive through a Christmas snowstorm back to New York, the journey having made the two of them, against the odds, friends.