With Five Easy Pieces, Jack Nicholson was still feeling his way into the maverick persona he would perfect during the rest of the 1970s. At this point, both he and the film were a bit too eager to romanticize, rather than undercut, the archetype.
Nicholson plays Bobby Dupea, a California oil worker trying to passive-aggressively worm his way out of a live-in relationship with a waitress named Rayette (Karen Black). Bobby insults her, rages at her, and cheats on her, but refuses to pull the plug himself. Black mostly manages to endure all this with a bruised dignity, aided greatly by the fact that Rayette regularly listens to Tammy Wynette. (Bobby derides the songs because of their lack of “musical integrity,” but the movie’s continued use of them suggests it disagrees with him on this point.)
We eventually learn that Bobby is a former classical pianist who has turned his back on his uppercrust family. So he’s rough around the edges—given to barking back at dogs—but he has poetry in him! Director Bob Rafelson, who wrote the film with Carole Eastman, provides Nicholson with an iconic moment that ingeniously captures who Bobby is: stuck in a traffic jam, he gets out of his car to play a piano in the bed of a truck in front of him. When the cars start moving, he keeps playing and is carried away off an exit ramp—unbothered with leaving his responsibilities behind and heading off into an uncertain future.
Unfortunately, once Bobby is called back home due to his father’s stroke, the movie leans more into the idea of him as a roguish, irresistible antihero. The sterility and intellectualism of the family home is suffocating, an atmosphere any red-blooded artist should rebel against. Bobby does so once again, this time by pursuing his brother’s girlfriend (Susan Anspach)—alarmingly, violently so in one scene. Five Easy Pieces clearly wants us to feel complicated about all of this, but only to a certain degree. The movie ends with another striking image of Bobby being carried away; I just wish it had spent a bit more time concerned with the hurt people he left in his wake.
(7/11/2025)
