Plot
Classical pianist Robert Dupea (Nicholson), who comes from a family of musicians, works in a California oil field. Most of his time is spent in bowling alleys, drinking beer in the trailer of his friend, Elton (Bush), or with his waitress girlfriend, Rayette (Black). When he learns that she is pregnant, and his friend Elton gets arrested for having robbed a gas station a year earlier, he quits his job and leaves for Los Angeles where his sister, Partita (Smith), also a pianist, is making a recording. Partita informs him that their father has suffered two strokes and urges him to return to the family home on Puget Sound. He tells Rayette that he must go to see his father and reluctantly agrees to take her along. On the way, they pick up two lesbians headed for Alaska whose constant chatter about "filth" increasingly annoys Robert. The four of them are thrown out of a restaurant when he gets into an argument with a waitress who refuses to accommodate his special order. Eventually, Robert reaches his destination. Embarrassed by Rayette's lack of polish, he registers her in a motel and goes to his family home. At dinner that night, he meets Catherine Van Oost (Anspach), a young pianist engaged to his brother, Carl (Waite), a violinist.
Despite personality differences, Robert and Catherine become attracted to each other and make love in her room. Meanwhile, Rayette becomes bored at the motel and comes to the Dupea estate unannounced. Her presence creates an awkward situation, but when Samia, a pompous family friend, ridicules Rayette's background, Robert gives a fiery defense of her. Storming from the room in search of Catherine, he discovers his father's male nurse giving the half-naked Partita a massage. Even more angered, Robert picks a senseless fight with him and is quickly knocked to the floor. He tries to convince Catherine to go away with him, but she tells him she cannot do it because he does not love himself or anything at all and thus should not expect love in return. After trying to talk to his unresponsive father, Robert leaves with Rayette, who makes a playful sexual advance to him which he angrily pushes off. At a gas station, when Rayette goes in for some coffee, he abandons her, hitching a ride on a truck to Alaska.
Read more about this topic: Five Easy Pieces
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“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
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