You don't have to be a car enthusiast to get the point of Lowriders. Though once you see those four-wheeled works of art, you might be a convert.
"I didn't get to drive one in the movie but in between takes they let me do the switches," Eva Longoria said, miming the motions of a lowrider's signature bounce. "It just scared me so much because they're so expensive. 'Eva Longoria breaks the car!' I was like, 'No, not going to be me.'"
Longoria grew up around lowrider culture—a religion all its own—in Texas, so when the script for director Ricardo de Montreuil's film came her way, she got the message right away.
"I think a lot of people don't understand the lowriding community," the actress told E! News' Marc Malkin. "The lowriding community is about family, and culture and legacy and tradition. It's a beautiful, beautiful art form and I hope people walk away from the movie understanding, 'Oh, that's what the culture means.'"
Longoria plays Gloria, whose husband Miguel Alvarez—played by Demián Bichir—owns an auto shop that caters to the lowrider community in East Los Angeles' Boyle Heights neighborood. Miguel's son Danny (Gabriel Chavarria) works in his dad's shop—Alvarez & Sons Motors—but his true love is street art, and he dreams of making a career out of painting and drawing. Meanwhile, Miguel is estranged from his other son, Francisco, or "Ghost" (Theo Rossi), who's just been released from jail and has a chip on his shoulder for obvious reasons.
"I met with Eva and I knew she was a very smart, strong woman, very concerned about politics and social issues," de Montreuil told E! News. "She had that very motherly quality that I was looking for in Gloria—a character that really grounds and holds together the family."
Bichir, who had previously met Chavarria on the film A Better Life, was a natural to play the family patriarch, a recovering alcoholic who's still seething with "internal rage" over his first wife's death and stubbornly refuses to see eye to eye with his sons.
Both de Montreuil and Longoria are excited for audiences to see Lowriders and hopefully better understand that the values, hopes and dreams within the Mexican-American community portrayed in the film at the end of the day traverse cultural and ethnic lines.
And as anyone who's interacted with family in any way knows—the challenges and conflicts that spring up among the ties that bind are universal.
"When you're growing up you want to rebel, against your parents, you feel your culture isn't cool enough, you do want to do whatever [the kids are doing]," de Montreuil says. "And eventually you have to grow up, you realize that who you are and where you come from is the most valuable thing you have, and what makes you the most proud."
While the film was years in the making for de Montreuil, who moved to L.A. 12 years ago from his native Peru, it just so happened that the release couldn't be more timely, now that so much of the political conversation is about putting up walls between countries and cultures rather than breaking them down.
"The reality is that most Mexican-Americans are Americans," de Montreuil says. "A lot of them don't speak Spanish or couldn't understand it, and sometimes people forget that. First of all, they are Americans, with Mexican heritage, and their culture is very much a fabric of the American culture.
"Lowriding was born in the 40s, in the States," he continues. "Worldwide it's extremely popular, in Japan, and Brazil and Italy. Sometimes I feel like it's not appreciated as the amazing, beautiful art form it is, and I think it should be embraced as part of American culture, just like rock or jazz."
With that being said, de Montreuil isn't looking to speak for an entire people.
"Danny's family, Miguel's family doesn't represent all Latinos in the country," he says. "Not every Latino's into lowriding, but at the same time, they are a typical Latino family, you know? And at the same time, they're no different from any other family."
And in addition to the crackerjack cast, which came together with a "magical" dynamism in de Montreuil's eyes, there are the gleaming, meticulously maintained cars.
"Being around people who owned and cherished their lowriders was a pretty amazing thing to experience," Yvette Monreal, who plays Danny's college-bound friend Claudia, tells E! News. "You can see all the hard work and details that were put into these cars. Lowrider culture is way more than just building and putting these cars together for show, it's about the relationships people create during the experience. Loyalty and trust...you become family. It's awesome!"
Longoria thinks the film, which also stars Melissa Benoist and Tony Revolori, does "a beautiful job" depicting lowrider culture, including the legacy and tradition behind it.
"This movie is so relevant about, 'Yeah what does the American dream look like?'" she told us. "I think Miguel's character is right when he says, just because the American dream may look a different way, doesn't mean it's not for you. Everybody has a different idea of what that means. Especially in a country like the United States, where the fastest growing demographic is the Latino community. So there's a lot of our community threaded through this country in a very beautiful way."
As for the cast, "everybody's amazing—but the cars upstage all of us."
Lowriders opens in theaters Friday, May 12.