Coming Soon
FIVE EASY PIECES
1970
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There are road movies about finding yourself, and then there is FIVE EASY PIECES, which is about discovering that yourself is the problem.
Nicholson plays the now iconic cad Bobby Dupea, a shiftless thirtysomething oil rigger and former piano prodigy immune to any sense of responsibility, who returns to his upper-middle-class childhood home, blue-collar girlfriend (Karen Black) in tow, to see his estranged, ailing father.
It was EASY RIDER‘s success that greenlit FIVE EASY PIECES—but director Bob Rafelson and screenwriter Carole Eastman’s film is totally human, trading RIDER‘s counterculture mytho-poetics for a study in the charisma of disdain (which Nicholson personifies) and how rebellion and loutishness are often indistinguishable (ditto), never excusing the pain Bobby causes. Set against the stillness of cinematographer László Kovács’s luminous landscapes, it’s a great work of the Discover America Seventies.
Nicholson plays the now iconic cad Bobby Dupea, a shiftless thirtysomething oil rigger and former piano prodigy immune to any sense of responsibility, who returns to his upper-middle-class childhood home, blue-collar girlfriend (Karen Black) in tow, to see his estranged, ailing father.
It was EASY RIDER‘s success that greenlit FIVE EASY PIECES—but director Bob Rafelson and screenwriter Carole Eastman’s film is totally human, trading RIDER‘s counterculture mytho-poetics for a study in the charisma of disdain (which Nicholson personifies) and how rebellion and loutishness are often indistinguishable (ditto), never excusing the pain Bobby causes. Set against the stillness of cinematographer László Kovács’s luminous landscapes, it’s a great work of the Discover America Seventies.