Five Easy Pieces

If BONNIE AND CLYDE kicked off New Hollywood, it was EASY RIDER and—above all—FIVE EASY PIECES that definitively adopted the ideas of the French New Wave. Director Bob Rafelson – a pivotal figure of New Hollywood, as detailed in Peter Biskind’s juicy Hollywood chronicle Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998) – delivers a raw and melancholic masterpiece. The film paints a portrait of a deeply divided America and the ultimate outsider wandering through it that is as sharp as it is sobering.

Jack Nicholson shines as Bobby Dupea, a classically trained pianist from an intellectual background who has fled his roots to work as a laborer in the Texas oil fields. He doesn’t feel at home there either, as Bobby is just as bored by the elite as he is by the working class. When he learns that his father is ill, he embarks on a road trip back home with his girlfriend, Rayette. That journey – famous for Nicholson’s legendary, razor-sharp diner dispute over an order of toast – forces him into a painful confrontation with his past.

FIVE EASY PIECES owes its timeless power to this layered character study. Bobby is constantly looking for the exit, not because things are better elsewhere, but because standing still means emotional suffocation to him. Concluding with an inimitable and bitter final scene, this New Hollywood classic offers a tragic portrait of a man who can root nowhere, and whose only real talent turns out to be running away.