Five Easy Pieces the road life of its hero. We follow him through bars and bowling alleys, motels and mobile homes, and we find him rebelling against lower-middle-class values even as he embraces them. In one magical 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. He named the film the best of 1970, and later added it to
Jack Nicholson for actor Rip Torn, who withdrew from the project after an argument with Hopper. In interviews, Nicholson later acknowledged the importance of being cast in "Easy Rider": "All I could see in the early films, before "Easy Rider", was this desperate young actor trying to vault out of the screen and create a movie career." Nicholson was cast by Stanley Kubrick, who was impressed with his role in "Easy Rider", in the part of Napoleon in a film about his life, and although production on the film commenced, the project fizzled out, partly due to a change in ownership at