John Travolta’s directorial debut, Propeller One-Way Night Coach (now on Apple TV), prompts one to ponder the difference between an ego project and a passion project. The longtime Hollywood star writes, directs, produces, narrates, and cameos in this hourlong film adapted from his 1997 short story of the same name, a glassy-eyed homage to his childhood love of airplanes. It’s no secret that Travolta is a longtime aviation enthusiast and a certified pilot who owns four aircraft – facts we need to keep in mind when watching this little ditty of a movie, which is fueled by more idealism for the act of flight than most of us possess. POWNC debuted to mixed reactions at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival (where Travolta earned an honorary Palme d’Or for his body of work), but it’s probably better on your TV, since it’s a trifle best unburdened by the context of a prestige event.
The Gist: It’s Dec. 28, 1962. Travolta begins narrating, and rarely ever stops from here on out. The story plays out like a memory, full of impressions, hazy perspectives, and odd little details that stand out for some reason, and Travolta will explain them all as if we can’t see them right there in front of us on the screen. Jeff (Clark Shotwell) is eight years old, and he lives with his single mother, Helen (Kelly Eviston-Quinnett). We learn that she’s 49, has “a good figure for her age,” likes her cocktails and cigarettes and nights out with men, and is a drama teacher and actress still clinging to the Hollywood dream. We don’t learn what happened to Jeff’s father. Helen drops a big one on her boy: “We’re moving to Los Angeles!” she says through her omnipresent, and likely heavily practiced, apple-cheeked smile. Jeff needs no persuading, because it means he can finally achieve a lifelong yearning and ride in an airplane for the first time.
Zooming through the sky by jet is the thing now, but they’ll travel via the slower, but more cost-effective method, [INSERT MOVIE TITLE HERE]. Jeff dashes to his room and pulls out a Buster Brown shoebox full of flight-schedule brochures and charts their route, with stops in Pittsburgh, Dayton, Chicago, etc. There’s no mention of any luggage as Helen’s mother drops them at a gleaming Art Deco airport and Jeff gets a fat eyeful of the big four-propeller aircraft they’ll be flying in for the next day or two-ish. For Jeff, it’s like Christmas morning in a Norman Rockwell painting, peering out the airplane window and waxing quasi-poetic about the fire shooting from the back of the engines, via Travolta’s on-and-on-and-ongoing narration.
On the flights and in airports and hotels, Jeff will meet pilots and fellow passengers and another boy obsessed with flight and we-can-call-them-stewardesses-because-it’s-1962, including Doris (Ella Bleu Travolta), whom he instantly falls in love with. He’ll eat hot dogs and participate in a running joke about chicken cordon bleu; he’ll peer down from a sleeper cubby to watch white-gloved hands slice beef au jus and surround it on the plate with green beans and potatoes, an image far more halcyon than someone pitching a nigh-microscopic packet of pretzels on your tray table. This is air travel as Travolta remembers it, and an unfortunate reminder of how much it sucks narwhal butt now.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? I get the feeling in many ways POWNC is Travolta’s Megalopolis in all the best and worst ways.
Performance Worth Watching: Ella Bleu Travolta stands out with a relatively naturalistic presence amid a bevy of overwrought performances.
Sex And Skin: None
Our Take: That Travolta-as-a-child stand-in Jeff tries chicken cordon bleu and doesn’t like it and repeatedly turns it down thereafter, then immediately falls in love with the stewardess played by Travolta’s real-life daughter Ella Bleu Travolta is a strong suggestion that we should avoid any and all subtextual analysis of POWNC, considering how all the aforementioned dishes up a piping-hot stew of (hopefully) unintentional weirdness.
That leaves us on the surface of this goofy endeavor, perhaps for better, but also worse, since the story hints at the underlying sadness of Helen, who’s aging somewhat ungracefully and chasing a young woman’s dream of glamor and fame, and maybe also a sugar daddy so she won’t have to buy a fancy coat from a secondhand sale to create the illusion of high class. Little Jeff is swept into this delusion, telling others that whatever film project his mother has been promised – heard here in vague enough terms to make you ponder its legitimacy – is a sure thing starring Paul Newman.
So yes, this is a confused film, and to answer my initial question, it’s presented with such a thick veneer of Travolta’s passion that nobody else involved likely dared to point out its numerous deficiencies, most notably stiff, heightened performances hamstrung by clumsy dialogue, dodgy visual effects, and a hopelessly corny sense of earnestness that comes off more as empty nostalgia than wistful remembrance. Layered on top of that is an insistent and intrusive score in battle with the insistent and intrusive narration – Travolta seems enamored with his own mundane prose – for our attention, and a level of emotional investment that just ain’t happening.
A less-confused version of POWNC could perhaps play as a tribute to Travolta’s mother, and good for him if he’s getting something personal from it, paying tribute to one of the joys of his childhood that’s persisted throughout his life. But for the rest of us, it’s a cheesy, overglossed, thoroughly awkward noncomedic nondrama playing across our screens like a series of glazed-plastic dioramas of midcentury idealism.
Our Call: This weird little nostalgia trip is functional remembrance for its maker, but not really for the rest of us. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.