Stream It Or Skip It: ‘On the Roam’ on Max, Jason Momoa’s Indulgent, Endearing Travel Series

On the Roam (now streaming on HBO Max) could also be titled Jason Momoa Loves Things in Slow Motion. The Aquaman and Fast X star produces and co-directs his own celeb-travel series, which follows him and his gregarious, outsized personality as he meets the artists and craftspeople he admires and hopes to collaborate with, from photographers to guitar makers – and, in the debut episode, motorcycle wrenchheads, who help him fulfill a dream of restoring and building replicas of antique machines so they can tear around in them with all the uberdramatic gravitas that seems to indicate Momoa has been in one too many movies directed by Zack Snyder.

ON THE ROAM: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Momoa rides an antique motorcycle, and looks even more like a gigantic human being than he already is.

The Gist: In voiceover, Jason Momoa tells us how much he likes quests, how ambitious he is, and that he is, at heart, a guy who likes to move a lot and travel and get his hands dirty. Next, a montage culled from this and upcoming episodes: Momoa on a skateboard, Momoa pounding on an anvil, Momoa hanging out with Slash – basically Momoa doing shit that’s manly, shit with power tools and open flames. Metallica’s ‘Wherever I May Roam’ is the opening credits theme, proof that he likes metal and needed a song that hits the nail right on the head and has a substantial budget. And from here on out, we’ll hang with a guy who can do whatever he wants and dreams because he’s the type of person who follows his passions no matter what – with the implied assertion that he probably wouldn’t be able to do much of any of this if he wasn’t rich as hell and famous.

Anyway, nobody who’s seen a Momoa movie or come to understand his uptempo vibe will be surprised to learn that he’s a ride-the-bike-of-life-til-the-handlebars-come-off personality, and that goofy metaphor fits perfectly with this episode, since it’s about his love of motorcycles. And not just any motorcycles, but 100-year-old Harley Davidsons. And not just any 100-year-old Harley Davidsons, but 100-year-old Harley Davidsons that guys in the 1930s used to race up dirt hills. He wants to see these bikes in person. He wants to touch them and fire them up and maybe ride them a little. And he wants to find the best motorcycle historians and mechanics in the U.S. of A. so they can use his fatass bank account to painstakingly construct replica bikes – Momoa’s will be his favorite color, baby’s-butt pink – and recreate the old races they love, captured in grainy 90-year-old films.

This quest requires Momoa to travel to such exotic locales as Maggie Valley, North Carolina, Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee and Topsfield, Massachusetts, each place introduced to us via drone shots capturing lush forest vistas. Some of the greasemonkeys he hangs with are his friends and some he’s meeting for the first time, but they’re all hairy men with bronzed, weathered skin and permacrud under their fingernails. They work and hang out and talk about DAHs and DARs (whatever those are, besides motorcycles), and much of it is in slo-mo with pensive music in the background, the most amusing bit occurring when one of the guys cuts his finger and we get a very dramatic, succulently lit shot of the bleeding appendage being wrapped in an old rag, surely like they did 100 years ago. Momoa brings all the dudes together for his own throwback MC he dubs the Roamers, and makes them all matching shirts with horizontal jailhouse stripes on the sleeves. It all seems not-very-rockin’ until they finish the bikes and find the right course and Black Sabbath plays on the soundtrack while they go tearing up a hill at speeds that are hard to determine because every shot is in slow motion. Check off one item on Jason Momoa’s Big List o’ Expensive Dreams!

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? So many celeb-travel series seem to use Anthony Bourdain as inspiration, don’t they? Ewan McGregor rode motorcycles in his three Long Way outings; Sam Heughan and Graham McTavish do manly stuff in Men in Kilts; that guy from The Walking Dead does the motorcycle thing in Ride with Norman Reedus.

Our Take: Momoa comes off as a guy who’ll hug you the first time he meets you, and will sooner rather than later play the guitar when you probably don’t want him to, and who you’ll expect to smell worse than he probably does. Inevitably, he’ll build a fire in the pit and everyone will sit around it goofin’ and laughin’ as smoke licks the treetops. He’ll go on and on about the things he loves, and you, more likely than not, will be swept up in his enthusiastic energy. Eventually, he’ll probably get gooey and sentimental about how much he appreciates you and your hard work and friendship. 

This, apparently, is what being friends with Momoa is like – and that seems to be what On the Roam aims to capture, in a slightly contrived, but slightly more authentic way. Some of us might scratch our heads at someone who yearns so mightily to put together a loud, rickety, dangerous machine and ride it up a big pile of dirt, but hey, to each their own eccentric pursuit. I get it – I couldn’t help but think that, if Momoa was my friend, he’d tell me that the stereo amplifier of original-lineup-of-Black-Sabbath vintage I inherited from a late pal is super f—in’ cool, because it’s old and beautiful and made out of wood and when you flip on the power switch it has that lovely period-specific hum. And what Jason Momoa probably unintentionally gets across most in this series is how cool it is to be Jason Momoa’s friend.

Of course, along with that comes the inevitable feeling that On the Roam is the ego-stroking project of a privileged individual. At least a little bit, anyway, with the notion tempered by Momoa’s gregariousness, which never seems phony. I can see his zealousness rubbing some the wrong way – you know, tone it down before you break something, buddy – but he’s ultimately an endearing guy who makes corny scenes of male-bonding camaraderie look enjoyable and heartwarming. Often On the Roam is too gauzy and overdramatic by half, but that just reflects the weight one ascribes to one’s passion, right? (You might present your quest to find, I dunno, a rare bird in the wild or recreate an object from your childhood in a similarly theatrical fashion.) The show may be indulgent, but you’d never accuse it of being inauthentic.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Like the opening shot, except it’s Momoa roaring up a hill on his custom pink Harley replica.

Sleeper Star: No room for sleeper stars in a Momoa reality series. He eats up too much bandwidth. But I’d like to ask if he has a personal stylist or dresser, just to see how/where he got the grungy-pink Sabbath Bloody Sabbath shirt that he wears over and over again in episode two, and reminds me of an only slightly less grubby Andrew WK.

Most Pilot-y Line: Momoa in voiceover: “I’m a vagabond. A dirtbag. I’m a roamer.”

Our Call: Those with an allergy to giant effusive personalities will want to look elsewhere for their travel-porn fix, but otherwise, there are far worse things than hanging out with the endearingly goofy Momoa. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.