[In American Graffiti] Lucas and his fellow writers, Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, manage to be serious without portentous symbolism or heavy underlining. They slip on an end title which they should have let the audience write for itself but, otherwise, their poise is flawless; the car crash at the end, to take the most obvious example, has not been inflated into an apocalypse. Despite its crowded sound track and its mesmerizing flow of images, American Graffiti is a low-keyed, unpretentious movie. Yet it cuts to the heart of something serious and entangling in American life….

Lucas has been amazingly thorough and technically dazzling in conjuring up this "last year of the fifties." Except for the final two sequences, the whole movie takes place after dark. Aided by his creative cast and camera crews supervised by Haskell Wexler, Lucas has spliced bits of San Francisco, San Rafael, and Petaluma into a ghost-dancing, iridescent nightgown, a galaxy of pranks, games, thrills, and lights through which the gaudy cars weave and cruise like phantoms. Maybe, after THX 1138, locking us into enclosed worlds is turning out to be a Lucas specialty, but American Graffiti has no trace of the earlier film's tired ideas and visual clichés out of tritely doom-laden student epics. It captures the humor and verve of youth that can, at least briefly, transform pop-schlock trash into an amusing, stylish constellation of codes and rituals. At the same time, it also finds some surprising emotions lurking behind them: each characterization catches us off guard with unexpected quirks and depths…. American Graffiti is not just a checklist of fifties memorabilia; it uses them to recapture the attitudes of the period, particularly the innocence that Vietnam, Oswald, hard drugs, birth-control pills, Nixon—the whole spectrum of sixties shake-ups—would alter, perhaps destroy, forever. (p. 58)

[The] surprising resonance of American Graffiti stems from its understated but trenchant criticism of nostalgia…. Lucas captures the sheer disposability of pop culture and its trappings. It's a jolt for anyone of his generation to see how quaint everything—clothes, cars, slang—now looks and sounds, nearly as archaic as the flivvers, phaetons, spats and idle rich of the twenties and thirties. Then you think, "But this was only eleven years ago." Those who thoughtlessly call this a "period picture," though it is one, unknowingly highlight its weird, unnerving distillation of future shock. Even those utterly inured to rapid change may feel a chill or two while they bellylaugh, when they experience firsthand how swiftly only yesterday has turned into long ago.

The movie is firmly plugged into the nostalgia boom that plays upon our desires for a sense of roots, for a more comprehensible world, for a half-fearful look back at our own innocence. The same media that bring disorienting change to our living rooms and thereby stimulate our urges to recapture the past usually reduce that past to safe, sentimental placebos: nostalgia peddlers chew up ever more recent chunks of yesterday and spit them out as flavorless, denatured pulp. But in American Graffiti, superman John—a wistful blend of machismo and charm, braggadocio and uneasiness—rebukes these merchandisers and those in thrall to them. He is living what they sell….

John is part of an American syndrome whose victims litter our imaginative writing: the "big rods" in Dan Wakefield's novel of the fifties, Going All The Way, rudderless jocks fixated on the sham accomplishments of their youths; F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tom Buchanan, the aging polo player who will never outgrow his cheap emotions; the paunchy, tired American gargoyles of Jason Miller's play, That Championship Season, compulsively reenacting the Big Game because it has turned out to be the high point of their miserable lives. In some ways, John is a more complex character than any of these: he is younger, softer, more sympathetic. (p. 59)

In American Graffiti, none of the young people but Curt can abandon a hometown … that is incandescent by night but deadening in the glare of the following day. The movie is a poetic lament for the passing of their wondrous night and all that it seemed to promise. This and the sensitivity of Lucas, Katz, and Huyck to the blighting influence of social conditioning on life's most crucial steps lends to American Graffiti, for all its real exuberance, a strong undertone of heartbreaking pathos. (p. 60)