PBS’ ‘Driver’ Misses the On Ramp
Labor Day doc offering about the truck industry simply doesn’t work
PBS marked Labor Day with the broadcast premiere of Driver, a POV documentary from veteran Nesa Azimi that follows a loosely connected group of female long-haul truckers as they try to navigate a deeply indifferent — and often hostile — industry. The film opens quietly, almost meditatively, with the camera trailing behind veteran trucker Desiree Wood. For ten long minutes, she drives silently through the American highway system. Then, without breaking her gaze from the road, she finally speaks: “Sometimes I see men masturbating in their cars. So I don’t look.”
It’s a stark moment that is emblematic of Driver’s approach. The film gestures at major issues like misogyny, labor exploitation, and isolation, but rarely does more than glance at them. Long stretches of road are punctuated by quick anecdotes about harassment and moments of feminist camaraderie, but viewers hoping to learn how the trucking industry operates, or what labor organizing actually entails in this context, will be left wanting.
Eventually, Driver arrives at a women’s trucking union retreat held, inexplicably, on a cruise ship. The choice is neither contextualized nor explained, leaving viewers adrift in scenes that feel more like a vacation slideshow than a documentary. Yes, these women deserve rest. But the film offers little insight beyond the fact that they’re truckers, and women, and occasionally frustrated.
Is Driver educational programming? Political advocacy? A character study? Azimi’s film declines to clarify. Even the film’s central figure, Wood — an activist with Real Women in Trucking, a group that aims to support and inform women truckers — remains curiously under-defined. Is she an independent contractor? A company driver? The film doesn’t say.
This omission matters. The nature of labor contracts, the distinctions between categories of employment, and the structure of corporate freight networks are essential to understanding the power dynamics at play in trucking. Instead, Driver collapses everything into gender: Men are often creeps; women endure and organize. That’s a beginning of a portrayal, not an endpoint.
One revealing moment comes late in the film, when union organizers try to recruit a fellow female driver. She shrugs them off — she’s never been harassed and doesn’t see the need. The organizers are visibly stunned, with no rhetorical tools at hand besides their own experience. The film, too, seems stumped. It’s unclear whether this is meant to be a teaching moment, a turning point, or just another awkward scene.
To its credit, Driver does touch on the appeal of long-haul trucking for women fleeing abusive relationships or seeking solitude. These personal reasons resonate, and show the clear need for personnel on mandatory truck trainings to avoid lewd asides — but the documentary never connects them to the broader labor context or provides any framework for how exploitation is systematized in the industry.
If Azimi’s intent was to evoke rather than explain, that’s fine. The first ten minutes of Driver — abstract, sensory, almost experimental — would feel at home in a film festival. But labor is political. A film that avoids structural analysis in favor of isolated anecdotes feels evasive, not neutral.
By contrast, HBOMax’s recent crime series Duster also included a subplot about women truckers in 1970s Arizona. While Duster suffers from its own genre clichés and vagueness (why would the corrupt union leader be in charge of fixing bathrooms?), it functions within the logic of serialized drama. Its characters’ reactions serve a plot. Driver lacks that structure — and, more fatally, lacks an argument.
The biggest knock against Driver is that you might learn more in 90 minutes on YouTube or TikTok than from this film. The stories of women truckers are clearly worth telling but Driver doesn’t do the work to make those stories resonate beyond the wheelhouse of personal experience. It wants to show that sexism is bad — which it is — but fails to show why, how, or what could change.
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What a dumb review. REAL Women in Trucking is not a union organizing group and you cannot explain every single issue in trucking in 90 minutes. All men are not creeps but if that is what you took from it you maybe should look in the mirror. If you want to know more about all of the issues that affect truck drivers like wage theft, employer driven debt, lack of broker transparency enforcement, lack of truck parking and sexual predators who have a CDL driving anonymously state of state you can Google and learn about it after the movie. I was a company driver and an owner operator. There is volumes of material about this on the internet. Not sure why someone thinks they should know everything about a person or an industry in 90 minutes. That’s just ignorant. There is actually a bathroom legislation bill happening right now for all drivers to be able to use the bathroom. Why it was covered in “Duster” is because that is actual history. We consulted with the production team for that show. The character is based of of an actual person named Adriesue “Bitzy” Gomez. Perhaps a little research before you run your mouth would do you well.
Hi Desiree Wood. First, I wanted to take a moment to thank you for taking the trouble to comment upon my review. You’ve actually clarified a lot of things that the documentary itself did not clearly describe. I had to go through a lot of back and forth on this piece with my editor, because it was genuinely difficult to figure out what, exactly, the documentary was trying to communicate, even when it came to basic expositional questions like whether or not you were attempting to engage in union organizing. I didn’t really know much more about you or the organizations you work with after finishing the documentary compared to when I started except your names, and even these weren’t exposited very consistently.
I hope you appreciate that this review is intended to appraise the documentary itself, not you as a person or REAL Women in Trucking as an organization. A person can learn more about the kind of work you do quite literally from just spending ninety seconds reading your comment on my review than they could from watching the documentary for the full ninety minutes. That bit about Adriesue “Bitzy” Gomez is quite fascinating! It wasn’t in any of Duster’s promotional material, and I could only corroborate it from a single obscure interview with Camille Guaty where she discussed her character.
All of which is to say is that simply because a media project communicates your ideas, doesn’t mean that they do it well. Indeed, if anything, I would think you might appreciate a review like this, as it’s a neutral perspective on how whether the people you worked with accurately and coherently represented your perspective as they no doubt promised to do in pre-production. In any case, I sincerely wish you the best of luck in spreading that perspective going forward. Your cause sounds like a noble one.
Thank You William. The film is meant for people to want to know more and to search for more answers to the questions they have.
I was one of the 1st female truck drivers on social media back in 2008. Rather than talk about frivolous nonsense, I used social media to talk about how unsafe truck driver training is that puts the general public at risk and the drivers themselves in very dangerous situations.
I went up against very powerful lobby groups and called them out.
I wrote my student truck driver story to warn others and it became the basis of 4 Dan Rather investigate reports. All but one are on YouTube now. The 4th is on Apple. I blogged about what was going on with the intimidation and manipulation I was getting from these lobby groups in my personal blog http://www.truckerdesiree.com , on YouTube & Twitter from 2008 – present but really got burned out on it. I wondered if any other women or groups was seeing what I was seeing. That is when I learned about a woman who was erased from trucking history. Adriesue “Bitzy” Gomez was part of the Coalition of Women Truck Drivers in the late 1970’s. I personally tracked her down. It took me 4 years to find her. I restored her story to trucking history. I was able to speak to her by phone a few times before she died. I became friends with one of her Daughters. There is a post about Bitzy on the REAL Women in Trucking website. I am contacted often by movies, film and TV productions. I consulted on the movie Paradise Highway with Juliette Binoche and Morgan Freeman and I appear in the movie as well as being a driving double in some scenes. When Warner Brothers people contacted me about “Duster” I had Idella Hansen a driver of over 57 years, Michelle Scolari driver for 40 years and Bitzy’s Daughter Dolores in the meeting. They had this element with trucking in the show they were trying to develop and we told them what was going on during that period. We were compensated for our time but we did not request a credit because “Duster” was still very early in development. It was not clear if it would get the greenlight. What was clear though is that a Bitzy type person was what they were looking for but they couldn’t do a a complete story of her without fully involving the family. The show touched on many historical characters. I really liked the show and so did her Daughter. Bitzy was a pistol and an inspiration to me to keep fighting the good fight. The “Driver” documentary is not about me. It’s about an industry that abuses the labor that serves this nation every single day. It’s meant to get people to think more about the people who work really hard to make sure store shelves stay filled and sacrifice life’s basic necessities themselves in order to do it.
Well, that’s the big question: what are documentaries supposed to be nowadays: educational, political advocacy, character study, memoir, art film? But I suppose the bigger question is who gets to decide.