Five Easy Pieces (1970)

Director: Bob Rafelson
Writer: Adrien Joyce, based on a story by Bob Rafelson and Adrien Joyce
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Karen Black and Susan Anspach

Index: The First Thirty.

I last saw Five Easy Pieces in 2008 and, while I don’t disagree with my review, I clearly didn’t get everything it was doing. Watching again in this flow of Jack Nicholson’s First Thirty, it’s a real gamechanger, even though the names are rather familiar.

The director was Bob Rafelson, who directed Head two years earlier from a Nicholson script. The writer was Carole Eastman, under a stage name, Adrien Joyce, as which she also wrote The Shooting. László Kovács shot the film, as he did four earlier Nicholson pictures, including Easy Rider. Leading lady Karen Black and Toni Basil were both in Easy Rider and the latter was also in Head. It’s all quite the reunion.

What’s different is that this is a seventies movie through and through, from an era when new filmmakers were changing the landscape of American film. There’s some of the nihilism of acid westerns like The Shooting here, but it’s otherwise unlike Nicholson’s earlier films that were just as clearly made in the sixties (even if some did feel like they were a decade late).

The first thing to acknowledge is that, while Robert Eroica Dupea is the lead character and the picture unfolds chronologically, the story really works cleverly in reverse.

We first encounter Bobby when he’s an oil worker in California living a working class life with his waitress girlfriend, Rayette Dipesto, a genuine but simple young lady who deserves a lot better than him. It would be easy to assume a great deal about him at this point, but that’s a mistake in this movie. The longer it runs, the more we learn about him and the more depth he acquires. By the time the finalé arrives and rooks us between the eyes, Bobby has become a substantial question mark.

There are two ways to examine that. One is through the character, Bobby Dupea, and the other is through the performance, Nicholson playing Dupea.

I didn’t like Bobby from the outset. He hates his girl’s taste in music—she dearly wants to sing like Tammy Wynette. He puts her down in front of his friends. He cheats on her every chance he gets. This behaviour really doesn’t improve as the film runs on.

I can’t say I liked him at the end either, but I did have a little more sympathy for him. Not a lot, mind you. He’s clearly been running away for his entire life, vainly trying to escape what he doesn’t like, and that might warrant some sympathy. However, he doesn’t like anything, so he’s never going to stop escaping, and that isn’t as easy to sympathise with.

What I appreciated was what Nicholson did to bring Bobby to life because it’s an absolute tour de force performance. He was nominated fairly for an Oscar for Easy Rider but it wasn’t a performance that screamed award. This is and I’m sure everyone watching in 1970 thought so by the time they left the theatre. Of course, he would go on to become the most nominated male actor in Academy Awards history, but he lost here to George C. Scott for Patton. His first win wouldn’t come until his fifth nomination, for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

It’s not a brave performance for the reasons we critics tend to use the word. There’s no full frontal nudity or substantial weight change. It didn’t require acting under the influence. He’s not tasked with an emotional breakdown. But it surely counts as a brave performance in my book because he’s unafraid to look bad, either physically or through his actions. Early on, he reeks of sweat and hard work, his hair all over the place. Later, he’s less unkempt but he’s an ugly character through how he treats others. We keep wondering why Raye stays with him.

After all, she doesn’t come across too great early on either. Initially, Karen Black plays her as simple and uncomplicated, consistently bad at everything except singing and, most of all, annoyingly pouty. No wonder Bobby tolerates her rather than any other emotion.

However, she sticks by him. She loves him. She cares for him, even though he’s always a shit to her. As we learn who he is and why, we start to realise how much more worthy she is than him in what counts. She’s genuine. She’s honest. And she has class, even if it isn’t from being born to a privileged family. Karen Black deserved her Oscar nomination too.

And, as we realise this, we realise that every other character only exists in relation to him. Some come off great, others not so much, but they’re there to deepen Bobby’s story, to bolster or contrast with it, to provide insight, context and meaning, to show who he truly is by how he acts or reacts around them.

Initially, those characters are working class folks like Bobby and Raye, people like Elton, a work colleague who cheats on his girl Stoney along with Bobby on a double date, or a pair of anti-consumerist girls he and Raye get closer to Alaska after their car crashes.

The first clue we have that Bobby isn’t quite as working class as we thought is when he and Elton find themselves stuck in a traffic jam on the interstate. There’s a truck ahead of them with a piano on the back, and he climbs on and has fun while we wonder how he knows how to play classical music.

We discover that when he visits Partita in a recording session. She’s a classical pianist and his sister and she lets him know that their dad is dying back on the island. And so off he goes, reluctantly including Raye in the trip, to visit his father and his past, which was clearly very much not working class. I’d buy that house for a dollar and everything in it too.

The core of the film is the scene with him in a field with his dad, who’s in a wheelchair and damaged enough from two strokes that he has no idea who Bobby is. He never says a word, a silent sounding board for his son who hurls a good deal of emotion at him.

I can’t say that I liked Five Easy Pieces. It isn’t really a movie to like. The question is whether I appreciated it from a cinematic standpoint. I certainly didn’t in 2008 but I did a lot more on a fresh viewing in 2025. Nicholson is excellent here, impeccably delivering his deepest, most nuanced and most substantial role yet. It’s also his largest role by far, not just the lead but the entire movie. If you took Bobby out of the film, there’d be absolutely nothing left.

It’s a meaningful, impressionistic character study that’s cleverly written, powerfully shot and impeccably performed. Whether it’s going to be for you or not will depend on how much you need to like or sympathise with the lead. Because you’re not likely to here.