Jessica Lange, Joan Allen and Kathy Bates in Bonneville Courtesy of SenArt Films

"It's a beautiful car. A huge, enormous vehicle," says Jessica Lange of the scarlet 1966 convertible she drives across the great American West with Kathy Bates and Joan Allen in Bonneville. "We were quite comfortable in it. We spent a lot of time in that car."

In this road trip/coming-of-(middle)-age movie, three friends head out from Pocatello, Idaho towards the shores of Santa Barbara on a five-day journey with detours to Las Vegas, the salt flats of Utah and Bryce Canyon. For grieving widow Arvilla Holden (Jessica Lange), the trip is a chance to start the healing process after the recent death of her husband Joe. While for Carol (Joan Allen), a Mormon woman who has had little exposure to a world beyond her home and church, the trip is a chance to widen her expectations and open up to other experiences in life. For Allen, the film's greatest challenge was in discovering the breadth and depth of her character's faith and self-awareness. "It was quite different than what I imagined," she confesses. She envisioned her character might be a plain woman in braids ("I was planning to be just like The Little House on the Prairie"), but when she spent time with Mormon women in Salt Lake City, she had to reassess her approach to the role. Lange found reward in the film's complex nuances: "What I liked most about the film is that it was on a very subtle level. So it didn't have huge broad strokes. It was very impressionistic in a way, pieced together with these little small brush strokes as opposed to huge plot points."

For all its outward similarities, say both actresses, Bonneville is no Thelma & Louise-styled female buddy movie for women of the Baby Boomer generation. There may be some sexy men in ten-gallon hats along the way, but there are no shootouts, rapes or suicidal plunges. "It was interesting because what we were doing was we were creating really a portrait of a friendship between these three women. And how it evolved, how it shifted," says Lange.

Lange and Allen riff on a variety of topics from the joys of taking a cross-country trip and their favorite driving music to handling grief after the death of a loved one to the trappings of fame and celebrity for this new generation of stars.