Description

By 1970 Jack Nicholson had already established himself as a formidable character actor who was capable of nimbly swiping scenes out from under bigger-name leads, but it was Five Easy Pieces that proved he was a star. Jack’s performance as temperamental dropout Bobby Dupea, a trained concert pianist desperate to escape the rigidity of his hidebound upbringing, is both vulgar and literate, caustic and caring. Landing him his first of many Academy Award nominations, his work with this role rises to fully inhabit a difficult and abstract space that - much like the era which it produced it - could be qualified interchangeably as deeply fragile or explosively unstable. Directed and co-written by Bob Rafelson (The Postman Always Rings Twice).