Drive, He Said (1971)

Directed by Jack Nicholson. Starring William Tepper, Michael Margotta, Bruce Dern, Karen Black, Henry Jaglom, Robert Towne, June Fairchild, Mike Warren. [R]

A curio out of the early-70s independent film boom—not only is it the first of just three directing jobs undertaken by Hollywood legend Jack Nicholson, but it might have been near-great if the final product wasn’t so disorganized. Slapdash storylines concern a fed-up college basketball player (Tepper) butting heads with his coach (Dern), an affair he’s having with the wife (Black) of one of his professors, and his paranoid, draft-dodging roommate (Margotta) who does drugs, pulls guerrilla stunts, streaks around campus, and commits an assault or two. In his first film role, Tepper is a blank slate (as designed, but a little too much so), but Margotta and Black do dedicated, emotionally-frayed work, and Dern is first-rate. Achieves a shivery rhythm itching to explode, and several vignettes work like gang-busters, but it too often feels like two films twisted into one without them ever merging—aside from lodging, nothing really connects the disenchanted hero to the psychotic rebel, and the final scene would have worked better had the film established some sort of kinship between them. Nicholson also co-produced and co-wrote; assisting him with the screenplay was Jeremy Larner and a then-unknown Terence Malick, whose contributions to the screenplay went uncredited. David Ogden Stiers has a minor role, and Cindy Williams can be spotted briefly.

76/100