Five Easy Pieces (1970), directed by Bob Rafelson. Criterion Collection DVD at home on Friday, February 3.

I came to Five Easy Pieces because of Matthew Specktor’s amazing memoir/biography Always Crashing in the Same Car. Seriously, that’s my favorite book from last year, and I’m part way through re-reading it again. In fact, I’ve had the pleasure of recommending it to a number who have come back and said, with almost a slightly baffled look on their faces, “that book was great.”

I thought I’d hate the book. I bought a copy when David Thomson, one of my favorite critics, wrote a glowing review in the London Review of Books. Always Crashing is a memoir of Specktor’s 40th year, when he’s feeling like a dead failure–he’s divorced, he’s not really making it as a writer, he’s moved back to L. A., and he’s recently received the news that his mother, long divorced from his father, has stage IV lung cancer which has spread. She was a failed screenwriter, too, much like a lot of people in L. A. (the book opens with perhaps one of the most talented people in the world to fail at screenwriting, F. Scott Fitzgerald.)

Rather than just write a mopey memoir about his own life, Specktor instead weaves his life and recollections in with stories of other failed artists in Hollywood, women and men who had some degrees of success, but never really got off the ground–Eleanor Perry, Warren Zevon, Thomas McGuane, Hal Ashby (among others) and, for me the most fascinating, Carol Eastman.

Eastman wrote The Shooting (an amazing and bizarre Western, directed by Monte Hellman), The Fortune (a half brilliant slapstick comedy, awfully directed by Mike Nichols, who is, I’m convinced, one of the worst directors ever acclaimed in movie history), and, among other scripts, some developed and some not, Five Easy Pieces, for which she was nominated for an Oscar.

Specktor describes her as being a reclusive, prickly person, not given to taking Hollywood’s dumb bullshit, and that, along with the fact that she was a woman, kept her from success. Sadly, it was probably the latter that had the most to do with it, since you could fill a football stadium with prickly male screenwriters who keep getting work again and again and again, since they’re considered brilliant and that’s what comes with the package (I assume women who are hard to work with are more commonly known as bitches and that makes them un-hireable).

Five Easy Pieces, though, is so strange. Nicholson’s Bobby Dupea is an oil rig worker and a right old shithead, drinking too much, verbally abusing his girlfriend, Rayette (Karen Black, amazing), having affairs, and barely keeping his head above water when, lo and behold, we discover that he’s the prodigal son of a talented family of classical musicians–Dad, sister, brother, all of whom live on Vancouver Island. So we cut from the arid sands of the California oil fields and their attendant honky tonks and country music to the verdant world of the Puget Sound and classical piano pieces played to sad people in front of cloudy windows.

I like and dislike this movie. The dialogue is honest and cutting, the actors amazing, the direction spot-on. The problem is that Nicholson’s Bobby is so deeply unpleasant, a portrait of a total failure, and yes, total failures tend to lash at those around them. To Eastman and Rafelson’s credit, none of the viciousness is delivered without an examination of the very profound pain that it causes. Maybe this movie bothers me because it reminds me too, too much of cloudy, dark rooms in Michigan that were, in my memory, the tableau for a collapsing marriage and family. Five Easy Pieces is beautiful and moving and frustrating and could only have been made in the 70s, when people made movies like this. It’s honest.

Man, would I strongly recommend reading Always Crashing in the Same Car and then plugging into Five Easy Pieces. It’s some strong medicine, but so very good for your soul.