Film

The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant

A lean, unsentimental HBO documentary short that spends the last weeks inside a Moraine, Ohio GM plant before it shuts down for good. No narrator, no swelling score — just the workers, the machines, and the quiet arithmetic of an ending. Forty minutes long, and it doesn't waste one of them.

TMDb rating5.9

If you liked this

American Factory2019

This is the same Moraine, Ohio plant, ten years later, reopened as a Chinese-owned glass factory — the ghost of the GM closing haunting every frame. Oscar-winning and clear-eyed, it's the natural next chapter.

But It's nearly two hours and digs deep into cultural friction and union organizing that some may find slower going.

American Factory poster

Harlan County U.S.A.1976

A landmark of American labor documentary — Kentucky coal miners on strike, filmed with the camera right in the danger. It set the template for everything that came after, including the film you just watched.

But It's rawer and more openly political, with confrontation and violence this film keeps mostly offscreen.

Harlan County U.S.A. poster

Roger & Me1989

Michael Moore's furious original about GM abandoning Flint, Michigan — funnier, angrier, and more theatrical than The Last Truck, but tracing the same wound a decade earlier.

But Moore inserts himself constantly and the satire can feel showy next to the quieter film you just finished.

Roger & Me poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Two Days, One Night2014

Same economic vice grip — one worker's job weighed against everyone else's money — but staged as a ticking-clock fiction instead of a fly-on-the-wall record.

Marion Cotillard spends a single weekend begging coworkers to save her job by giving up their bonus — a taut, humane thriller about the same brutal math of who gets to keep working.

But It's a subtitled Belgian drama, fictional and tightly plotted, nothing like the observational, real-world texture you just watched.

Two Days, One Night poster
More like this (8)

American Dream1990no page yet

Barbara Kopple's other landmark labor documentary follows a bitter, ultimately doomed meatpacking strike in Minnesota — as intimate and infuriating as Harlan County, USA.

But It's tougher and more confrontational, with union infighting that muddies the clean us-versus-them story you might expect.

Detropia2012no page yet

A wider-lens portrait of Detroit's collapse — auto jobs, opera houses, blogger optimists — that turns one city's decline into something almost operatic and strange.

But It's more impressionistic and less focused on individual workers, so it can feel diffuse if you wanted more faces like these.

Waging A Living2005no page yet

Four families working full-time and still barely surviving — this documentary follows the invisible math of low-wage America with the same patient, unglamorous camera as The Last Truck.

But It's less cinematic, made for public television, and its focus is poverty broadly rather than one closing plant.

The Overnighters2014no page yet

Desperate workers chase a fracking boom in North Dakota while a small-town pastor tries to house them — a documentary about hope curdling into something darker, with real narrative twists.

But The story turns in an unexpected, heavier direction that has little to do with factory work — closer to a thriller than an elegy.

Hoop Dreams1994

Not about factories at all, but nobody has filmed the slow grind of working-class American hope and disappointment better than this three-hour basketball documentary.

But It's a long commitment about teenagers chasing NBA dreams — a very different subject, even if it's a kindred spirit.

Hoop Dreams poster

Inequality for All2013no page yet

Robert Reich turns a college lecture into an accessible, urgent explainer on how America's economy stopped working for people like the ones in The Last Truck.

But It's talking-head and chart-heavy — closer to a TED talk than the observational style you just watched.

Salt of the Earth1954

Both put actual workers on screen as themselves, trusting their faces and voices over professional actors or narration to tell a labor story.

Blacklisted filmmakers cast real striking miners and their families to play themselves in a fictionalized version of their own labor dispute — a strange, moving hybrid nobody else was allowed to make in Cold War America.

But It's a stiff, low-budget 1954 production with amateur performances and overt political messaging that can feel dated.

Salt of the Earth poster

The Full Monty1997

Same industrial collapse, same stripped dignity of men who built their identity around a trade — but here the response is absurd hope instead of grief.

Unemployed Sheffield steelworkers decide to become strippers to pay the bills — a scrappy, big-hearted comedy that finds laughter in exactly the despair The Last Truck sits inside quietly.

But It's broad British comedy with nudity and jokes, a completely different register from the sober documentary tone you've just spent forty minutes in.

The Full Monty poster

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