“The best that I can do is apologize.“

He’s happiest when he hitches a ride on back of a truck in traffic and spontaneously plays a beautiful melody on an out-of-tune piano amidst the cacophony of honking horns, or when he flaunts around his father’s kitchen and mimes a Vegas showgirl routine in front of his prim and proper siblings to try to make them laugh. Jack Nicholson’s Robert Dupea exists at the intersection of two worlds, and he hates them both. He spends his life chasing an existence that does not exist: a happy medium between upper-class and blue collar worlds. Unfortunately, society doesn’t provide much opportunity for class overlap.

This rigidity is cheekily summed up in what has become the most infamous scene in Five Easy Pieces: the “Chicken Salad Sandwich” scene. In that scene, Dupea, his girlfriend Ray, and two hitchhikers stop at a roadside diner for breakfast together. The dialogue between Dupea and the waitress is memorable not just because of Dupea’s witty, snarky punchline at the end of it, but because the interaction speaks directly to this theme of wanting to live your own way but being forced to exist within rigorous, arbitrary parameters instead:

“I’d like a plain omelette, uh — no potatoes, tomatoes instead, a cup of coffee, and wheat toast.”

“No substitutions.”

“What do you mean? You don’t have any tomatoes?” “Only what’s on the menu. You can have a number two – a plain omelette. It comes with cottage fries and rolls.”

“Yeah, I know what it comes with, but it’s not what I want.”

“Well, I’ll come back when you make up your mind.” He doesn’t take kindly to this response.

Life, too, doesn’t allow Robert Dupea to make any substitutions. It seems like everywhere, as in this breakfast, he is doomed to not get what he wants.

One of the hitchhikers lauds him for sticking it to “the man” — or in this case, the woman: “Fantastic that you could figure that all out and lie that down on her so you could come up with a way to get your toast. Fantastic!”

His reply sums up his internal dissatisfaction: “Yeah, well, I didn’t get it, did I?”

It’s a funny, quirky scene, but it’s also meaningful: it’s a lesson in creating a memorable tangent in a story that seems arbitrary but in actuality ladders back up to character and theme.

To spend time reflecting and discerning what makes Robert Dupea say what he says and do what he does in this and every other scene in the film is what makes it compelling. A multitude of seemingly disconnected moments add up to be a fully-formed character study by the end.

Five Easy Pieces places Dupea in a blue collar setting, an upper class home, and many places on the road in between. We see him interact with women, family, and friends in both worlds. Together, these scenes and interactions paint a dynamic portrait of a self-sabotaging man who can’t find his place in the world.

He’s dissatisfied with his simple, no-frills, blue collar girlfriend. He’s embarrassed by her and doesn’t treat her well because of it. He refuses to tell her that he loves her. He cheats on her. He’s unkind.

But he cannot find satisfaction with an “upper class” woman, either. He seduces and sleeps with Catherine, his brother Carl’s fiancee. What started off as a perverse challenge for him ends up leaving him smitten. When he eventually asks Catherine to run away with him, she replies harshly: “I’m trying to be delicate with you, but you just won’t understand. I couldn’t go with you. Not just because of Carl and my music, but because of you.” He’ll never be good enough for her, because he’s just not proper enough.

She — and his siblings, and all of the other people that Robert grew up around — live tedious lives that Robert could never relate to. He can’t stand most of the people from the high society lifestyle that they represent. During his visit to his father’s home in this film, a pretentious intellectual drones on and on about philosophy, and Robert rolls his eyes, waiting for it all to be over; then, when the intellectual insults Ray for liking something as low-class as television, Robert lashes out at her, asking her where she gets the nerve “to tell anybody anything about class, or who the hell’s got it, or what she typifies? You shouldn’t even be in the same room with her, you pompous celibate.”

It would come across as a bold statement of values had he not effectively demeaned blue collar workers himself in earlier scenes. Instead, it comes across as just another facet of his internal confusion and rage.

Earlier in the film, he gets bored aimlessly sitting in a trailer park watching TV with his oil worker friend and can’t wait to get back home. Then, when that friend tries to tell Robert what he should be doing with his life, he is offended by someone “lives in a trailer park compare his life to mine. Keep on tellin’ me about the good life, Elton, because it makes me puke.” Rich and poor alike are both targets for his disdain.

He wants the best of both worlds at the same time, but society doesn’t allow much for substitutions.

It’s important that we spend significant time with him in both “cultured” and “uncultured” environments in order to learn what we end up learning about him. What Five Easy Pieces does so well, from a storytelling standpoint, is that it provides scenes in each setting that are mirrors for one another — like these personal verbal attacks.

Judging him solely for his actions and how he treats the people around him, we would not think too highly of Robert Dupea. But Five Easy Pieces also does something else well that allows us to recognize and process the inner turmoil that he very clearly feels and not judge him so harshly. It does so by making us witness to private moments — Robert Dupea, alone with his thoughts, conflicted.

The best example of this comes about a quarter of the way through the film, after he receives devastating news about his father and learns that his girlfriend is pregnant. He coldly walks out on Ray, leaving her alone in tears and telling her that the best that he can do is send her some money — implying that he is walking away from her entirely. Instead of cutting directly to a scene of him on the road, or just having him walk back inside having had a change of heart to ask her to come with him, the filmmakers cut to a private moment of him in his car. In the car, he freaks out at himself for his own behavior, made restless by his conflicted emotions. He thrashes about and swears, then pauses… and then gets out of the car to ask her to join him on his road trip.

Private moments like this, and the bathroom scene that takes place right before the film’s depressing but fitting ending, are essential to the film’s success as a character study. Without them, we wouldn’t understand Dupea nearly as well.

By the end of the movie, we have enough information to know what makes him tick. Five Easy Pieces commits to exploring Dupea as deeply as it can. We spend nearly a half hour with him in his blue-collar life in rural California before we even learn that he came from an upper class background; the only hint is his impromptu piano recital from the back of that truck. We sit with him in private — and public — moments of conflict. What emerges by watching these scenes is a compelling portrait of a tortured soul. We may not like him or agree with his actions, but stories like this push us toward developing empathy… and give us pause for self-reflection.

The settings of each world contrast with one another as much as the characters in each do. Dupea’s childhood home is pristine and full of expensive things; it sits on an island accessible only by ferry, surrounded by beautiful trees and a serene body of water. His life in California, by contrast, plays out in his sparsely decorated apartment full of cheap furniture, the bowling alley and diner in his community, and the dusty, dirty, dangerous oil fields in which he works. He even wears different qualities of clothing in each, as if he’s always just trying to fit in to what is expected of him depending on where he’s at.

This movie isn’t particularly flashy, from a filmmaking perspective. The acting and writing do most of the work here. But there is one moment that says so much so sadly through images far more than performance and words. Catherine pushes Dupea to play her a song on the piano; she cannot fathom how someone with the kind of classical training and upbringing that he had could have given up on music entirely. He obliges, and sits down at the piano to play a Chopin tune. As he strikes the solemn chords, the camera sweeps around the room, lingering on old photographs of a younger Robert and his family in their heyday. The camera sweep ends when the song ends, resting on his face as the final notes ring out. Catherine is visibly moved by the music and compliments him for making her feel something. She tells him that he has talent.

He won’t accept the compliment. Instead, he self-sabotages, pushing her away and scoffing at his own abilities. “I faked a little Chopin. You faked a big response.” He can’t accept that a life that he intentionally ran away from could possibly have worked out, so he becomes cruel.

Every scene in this movie is crafted to make us learn more and more about this troubled man — the private moments, the mirrored scenarios in disparate environments, the tangential scenes that speak to character traits and themes… it all adds up.

And then, near the end of the movie, there is a devastating confessional monologue to cement it all in place. Dupea sits in a field across from his father, who after two strokes is confined to a wheelchair and cannot speak. All of the turmoil comes out of Dupea in that moment. “The best that I can do, is apologize.” But it all feels hopelessly too late; the trouble is that he never finds resolution, the old man cannot give him the closure that he seeks, and he lacks an anchor to prevent him from aimlessly drifting onward in search of elusive happiness.

It’s heartbreaking, and Jack Nicholson nails the performance. For all of his bravado and brashness, his confessional still feels like a gut punch by the time he gives his last apology: “I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”