The Flamethrowers

After his epic motorcycle ride through the city, Valera declares in writing that he is dead—a new Valera must be born. Valera joins the gang of motorcycle riders from the Café and buys his own motorcycle, the fastest in the crew. Their leader is Lonzi, another wealthy Milanese heir with a penchant for subversion. He advocates for living in the moment and erasing from consciousness all the traditions and rules that bind people in society. Lonzi is aggressive in his shock factor and dismissive of cultural norms, and he has little respect for women. He convinces the group of young motorcyclists to join the war effort against the Austrian-Hungarian empire as yet another way of turning the regular world upside down. The young Italian men join assault regiments, and Valera ends up in a motorcycle unit with Copertini. Valera and Lonzi survive the war, but half of their motorcycle group dies, including Copertini who runs into a tree. After the war, Valera aspires to design the fastest motorcycle in the world. His father agrees to fund production if the design works, and with financial support on his mind, Valera tries to design the motorcycle almost as a weapon.

A month after meeting the strangers with the gun, Reno decides to apply for a job posted in the paper. The posting calls for a presentable person with film experience. Giddle helps get Reno ready with hair and makeup and reveals that she often sleeps with men for money and help with rent. Reno is sometimes confused by Giddle but grateful for their friendship.

Later, Reno meets Marvin and Eric who own a processing lab called Bowery Film. Even though her job is mostly dealing with customers, Reno is also used as a model for proper coloring in the editing process.

Giddle tells Reno about how she became an actress. She had been part of Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd, going to parties and trying to get into movies and modeling. One day, she met a waitress at a diner who revealed that she was a sociologist pretending to be a waitress for research. Giddle was attracted to this idea of life as a performance, so she became a diner waitress and found that it was easy to completely lose sight of who she was before and adopt to the waitress life entirely. Reno wonders why she’s friends with Giddle, who seems so alone and behaves strangely.

At work, Marvin and Eric tell Reno that a man has been asking about her, wanting to meet her. Reno hopes that it’s the friend of the strangers from the bar. They tell her his name is Sandro Valera, an Italian artist. Reno recognizes the name from the motorcycle company, and Giddle tells her that he’s famous and has an art show coming up at a gallery she could check out. Reno goes to his gallery and observes Sandro’s art. She describes the empty cube structures as “Minimalism.” Giddle tells her that Sandro is older, good-looking, and into younger women. Later, when she and Sandro are a couple, Reno will remember what Giddle said and wonder whether Sandro really loved her.

Marvin gives Sandro Reno’s number, and even though he is not the stranger from the bar as she had hoped, she finds him handsome and interesting. On their first date, they walk through Chinatown and he touches her in a movie theater without any ceremony, though Reno finds it erotic, nonetheless. They continue a walk around the neighboring streets after the movie, and they witness a man drowning in the Hudson River. Sandro saves him by lassoing him and pulling him onto the shore while Reno calls for help. When she sees that the man saved from drowning is wearing several layers of clothing and has a perplexed look in his eyes, she realizes that he was trying to kill himself.

On their second date at an Italian restaurant, Sandro and Reno delve deeply into her childhood and sense of self. Reno believes that Sandro cares to know and love every part of her. When Reno goes over to Sandro’s place for the first time, she meets his best friend: Ronnie Fontaine, the very same man from that night with Thurman and Nadine.

Ronnie and Sandro met at age 18, when they both worked as security guards at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They were both fascinated with a Greek statue of a little enslaved girl, a statue Sandro later shows to Reno. When Reno and Ronnie meet again at Sandro’s home, they pretend not to know each other. Ronnie and Sandro begin to hang out at Reno’s favorite diner, where Giddle works. Giddle is largely dismissive of the men and doesn’t trust famous people. Sandro is extremely dismissive of Italy, his home country. Meanwhile, Ronnie, forever poking fun at Sandro’s family history, keeps his own childhood a secret. Sandro introduces Reno to the commercial art world, and with his connections she plans her landscape artwork on the salt flats in Nevada. Ronnie suggests that she borrow a Moto Valera from Sandro, which seems to displease Sandro. Ultimately, Sandro sets Reno up with a motorcycle for her project.

In Nevada, Reno awakes from her motorcycle crash. In the silence of her accident, she sees incredible colors in the landscapes around her. She is somewhere on a hillside, and soon a rescue team on skis finds her and helps her down the slope. They call for medics, and Reno tells them she’s with the Valera team to avoid being charged for an ambulance. The Valera medical team helps patch her up, and she asks to go back to the scene of the crash to take her photographs. A technician brings her over, and Reno is pleased to see the tracks in the snow. She takes her photographs then continues to stay with the Valera team for five days while she heals. The medical and technician teams take a liking to her, and Tonino especially loves that she can speak Italian, a relic of her year abroad in Florence. The star motorist, Didi Bombonato, opposed taking her in but has to accept her presence even though they don’t like each other. Didi prepares for his major speed trial, with a crowd of spectators who have stayed precisely to watch this. Before he begins, however, Tonino stops him. Their union in Milan voted on and called for a strike, so Tonino and his team can’t work. Then they point out that they’ve left several company procedural steps incomplete, thereby slowing the day down with bureaucracy. This drags on a for days, with the Moto Valera team working at a snail’s pace in order to honor their strike, infuriating Didi. Tonino tells Reno about the war between Valera factory workers and the company back home in Italy. Reno tries to get in contact with Sandro but is told that a woman picked up his phone and said he wasn’t there.

Reno recalls the story Sandro told her about his friend from Argentina, whom he names M in order to protect his privacy. M’s father was involved in the Argentine dictatorship, a fact that tantalizes people who discover this about M. Sandro and M bond over having fathers they want to be separate from and family names they want to escape.

Finally, the strike ends and Didi runs his speed trials, breaking his own world record. He immediately flies to Europe to promote Valera tires, while Reno and the technician team celebrate. Tonino proposes an idea to Reno. He wants to make sure that the American team who are on their way don’t beat Didi’s time. Tonino wants to stay on at the salt flats, train Reno in the vehicle Didi drove called The Spirit of Italy, and have her beat the women’s record. By taking up the space with training and a speed trial, the Valera team can wait out the American team until the rains come.