Titled with reference to a book of piano lessons for beginners, Bob Rafelson's 1970 drama Five Easy Pieces is the affirmation of Jack Nicholson's arrival as a big time movie actor. Following a star turn in Dennis Hopper's 1969 counter-culture hit, Easy Rider, his role as Bobby Dupea, a once promising concert pianist now living hand-to-mouth doing manual labor, is a tour de force screen performance. Significantly it's also the demonstration of a new aesthetic style foisted onto Hollywood then seeing the end of the post-War generation's dominance over motion pictures.

To this end Rafelson's movie, penned by the director and Carole Eastman writing as Adrien Joyce, is a marvelous character study of a deeply flawed and sympathetic man. Riddled with confrontational dialogue, a detailed texture first of working class life and then of aristocratic isolation, each section including a number of memorable supporting characters, Five Easy Pieces centers on the inability to reconcile disappointment with the unraveling course of one's life. It never sentimentalizes its characters or their experiences and it ends on a somber, tragic note with Bobby striking out into the great unknown, though not as an act of triumph. Instead it's the final demonstration of failure to emphasize the movie's overall theme seemingly as the main point of adult life at the beginning of the 1970s.

Opening as Bobby returns home from his day labors working on an oilrig to Rayette Dipesto (Karen Black), his live-in girlfriend, their life is marked by his indifference to emotional intimacy. Always avoiding her pleas for affection and kindness, Bobby is a coarse man with a hot temper that makes him a bastard and a barrel of laughs. Keyed up on his penchant for excitement Rayette struggles to balance his steady stream of insults with her need for the comforts provided by dysfunctional and mean-spirited men.

Out bowling one night with their friends Elton (Billy Green Bush) and Stoney (Fannie Flagg) Rayette becomes upset after learning of Bobby's hostility to settling down. Based on the example of Elton and Stoney who live in a mobile home raising their child and keeping just barely ahead of their next paycheck, Bobby rejects the very idea of domestic bliss. He responds by picking up a couple of bowling alley ladies to reveal how his relationship with Rayette is based on sex play and her fragile sense of self, not to mention his serial inability to commit or offer nurturance.

In no uncertain terms, Bobby is a leech but one with inspiration and a conscience. He's an emotional bruiser who encourages the devotion of various losers who latch on to his upward mobility as the stakes for a better life. Ultimately, though, he's a self-centered man unable to love anyone, perhaps not even himself.

When Rayette fabricates a pregnancy Bobby refuses her ploy to trap him and visits his sister Partita (Lois Smith) who is also a concert pianist. Their reunion is brief but he learns of his father's declining health and agrees to visit before it's too late and the man is dead. Intending his trip as the opportunity to deliver an ultimatum to Rayette and end their relationship, he instead asks her to accompany him on his road trip to his family's island home in Washington.

On the way Bobby and Rayette bicker constantly, pick up a pair of hitchhikers and ultimately deliver themselves into the rarefied world of his youth. He leaves her at a motel with a few dollars to eat and ventures forth into the maze that spun him with so much hostility.

After welcoming remarks and nostalgic reflection Bobby's sociopathic behaviors are quickly given root in a repressed household once lorded over by his father Nicholas Dupea (William Challee), now a wheelchair-confined invalid lacking the powers of speech. Around him are arranged his physical therapist, his doting daughter Partita, older son Carl (Ralph Waite), Bobby and Carl's music student lover, Catherine Van Oost (Susan Anspach).

Instantly settling into old patterns of passive aggressive cruelty Bobby tries seducing Catherine while dismissing his brother as an awkward clod. At first unsuccessful he eventually wins Catherine over but only long enough for her to discover his fundamental indifference to the world. Accurately seeing this attitude as closely tied to Mr. Dupea sr. and the demands of his own youthful talents, Catherine spurns Bobby causing him to try reconciling with his father who can grant him nothing more than the saddened glare of muted eyes and silence.

In a house of musicians the lack of communication or sounds of joy is deafening. Everywhere Bobby sees echoes of past failures and unfulfilled promise. Also sensing their own struggles for completion his brother and sister have insulated themselves against the outside world and taken solace in their quiet world beyond the influence of modern times.

Then Rayette shows up on the island and Bobby's two carefully segregated worlds collide. Never understanding how he could leave his birthright as a brilliant musician, Partita, Catherine and Carl remain indifferent to his struggle to find himself and become whole for the first time in his life. At a preposterously stuffy dinner party Bobby loses control after listening to a houseguest insult Rayette and he realizes it's time to go.

Driving off early the next morning he and Rayette head south to reconstruct their life far away from Bobby's troubled past. They stop at a gas station and while an attendant refuels their car he faces himself in the men's room mirror, unable to go on. A truck driver pulls into the station and Bobby arranges a ride north leaving Rayette behind with all his worldly belongings save his next adventure into the great unknown.

Credits role and the big rig charges down the highway to end Five Easy Pieces that is anything but a joyful or pleasant film. Its darkly comic moments punctuate a character study that is in equal parts humorous and painfully revealing. For every light, positive moment like the infamous chicken salad sandwich speech or the tirades of Palm Apodaca (Helena Kallianiotes), one of the hitchhikers Bobby and Rayette pick-up on their drive to the Dupea's island, there are an equal number of disappointments and small horrors to confront. Among them is the awful confrontation of father and son with Bobby wheeling his paraplegic dad onto the grounds of their island only to crumble into tears trying to achieve forgiveness for crimes real and imagined.

Built on moments like these the overall effect of Rafelson's film is tragic and somewhat revolutionary. It eschews classic characterization of heroes and villains and allows Bobby Dupea to become the depository of mutually admirable and despicable traits. All around him are arranged the constellations of his life from Rayette to Catherine, each of whom also illustrates some of the same majesty and impoverishment of person that's so well defined in Bobby. Such overall ambivalence may not be truly original in the movies but it is a sign of the changing times in the late '60s and early '70s that filmmakers would choose to embrace episodic, character-centered downers over linear narratives with moral centers and triumphant conclusions.

No one in Five Easy Pieces is entirely good or bad. Even bit players like Stoney are rendered somewhat ambivalently. In her case it's her connection with Elton who emerges a felon on the lamb that finally darkens her otherwise sunny disposition but it's the excellence of the film's improvisational quality that gives these portraits a non-judgmental spin. Almost documentary like and often shot in long take in mid-shots, performance are allowed to linger and grow across time rather than relying on the artificial constructs of editing and close-ups to direct an audience towards what's most important.

It's this quality of quiet observation that makes Rafelson's movie remarkable. Ostensibly nothing more than a few episodes in the life of Bobby Dupea as he flies away from the complications of adulthood, the scenes of the film add up to glimpses of people coming apart but only inasmuch as the filmmakers remain unobtrusive. Said differently, the movie's camerawork frames actions but doesn't interfere with events to give them meaning or force plot points which finally creates a sense of Bobby's world existing in parallel to the screened account of his life.

Written to move Bobby and his supporting crew from points A to B to C on the basis of experiences that are as ordinary as they are memorable, the result is a devastating portrait of irresponsibility and neglect. From Nicholas Dupea's legacy of troubled children including Partita's extraordinary repression, Carl's inability to deal with conflict and running all the way through Bobby's fundamental indifference, Five Easy Pieces illustrates family dysfunction with hip language and uniformly brilliant performances. Plus it sustains the title reference about piano music with frequently played selections by Johann Sebastian Bach, Frédéric Chopin and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, not to forget the naming of Carl and Bobby with the middle names Eroica and Fidelio, respectively.

I'm not sure Rafelson's movie is an outright classic although it certainly influenced 1970 and stamped BBS and Raybert as production houses with an air of legitimacy. Their formation to produce films outside Hollywood was an indication of the financial and artistic circumstances of the period. Just as surely their formation makes an aesthetic shift to emphasize improvisational filmmaking thereby freeing American movies from the cloistered demands of the classical era studios. Subsequent work surely benefited from this departure though the legacy of Five Easy Pieces may very well be found in Nicholson's angrier scenes and the domino effect of opening market space for other independent pictures of lasting original virtue. .