Film Forum

U.S., 1970
Directed by Bob Rafelson
Screenplay by Carole Eastman
Starring Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, Susan Anspach
Approx. 98 min. 

“Hold it between your knees.” Jack Nicholson plays Bobby Eroica Dupea, an alienated oil-field roustabout and gifted piano virtuoso, on the run from his well-bred roots. Drifting along the West Coast, he dallies with blue-collar waitress Karen Black, whose uniform reads “Rayette,” and bowls with his buddy Billy “Green” Bush, whose wife is played by Fannie Flagg (author of Fried Green Tomatoes). He gives a ride to motor-mouthed hitchhiker Helena Kallianiotes and teaches a rule-obsessed waitress a memorable lesson in greasy-spoon etiquette. He tries to reconcile with his father, who has been left speechless by a stroke, and he casually performs a few other “easy pieces” by Chopin along the way.

FIVE EASY PIECES was shot by cinematographer László Kovács, influential for his work in the development of the 1970s American New Wave. Long-time Nicholson pal Carole Eastman (writing under the pseudonym Adrien Joyce) expanded the screenplay from three sketches by Rafelson, and based the character on Nicholson, her own brother, and real events. The film received Oscar® nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Supporting Actress.

A SONY PICTURES RELEASE

Reviews

“One of the best American films! A masterpiece of heartbreaking intensity! Rafelson calls our attention to the grimy life textures and the shabby hopes of these decent middle Americans. They live in a landscape of motels, highways, TV dinners, dust, and jealousy, and so de we all, but they seem to have nothing else. The movie is joyously alive to the road life of its hero. We follow him through bard and bowling alleys, motels and mobile homes, and we find him rebelling against lower-middle-class values even as he embraces them. In one magial scene, he leaps from his car in a traffic jam and starts playing the piano on the truck in front of him; the scene sounds forced, described this way, but Rafelson and Nicholson never force anything, and never have to. Robert Eroica Dupea is one of the most unforgettable characters in American Movies.”
– Roger Ebert

“One of the best American films for years... Nicholson’s performance was one of the great charismatic ones.”
– David Shipman

“It’s a striking movie, eloquent, important, written and improvised in a clear-hearted American idiom that derives from no other civilization, and describing as if for the first time the nature of the familiar American man who feels he has to keep running because the only good is momentum.”
– Pauline Kael