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
Easy Rider of the so-called "post-classical Hollywood" came to represent a counterculture generation increasingly disillusioned with its government as well as the government's effects on the world at large and the establishment in general. Although Jack Nicholson appears only as a supporting actor and in the last half of the film, the standout performance signaled his arrival as a movie star, along with his subsequent film "Five Easy Pieces" in which he had the lead role. Vice President Spiro Agnew criticized "Easy Rider", along with the band Jefferson Airplane, as examples of the permissiveness of the 1960s counterculture. The film's success, and