Drive, He Said (1971)

Drive, He Said (1971), directed by Jack Nicholson.

A loosely plotted slice of those chaotic revolutionary years revolving around a star basketball player, his crazed radical roommate, and a married ballerina. The roommate (looking and talking a lot like the director) comes to dominate the story: he tries to evade the draft by acting mental, and in the end isn't acting.

This is probably once only for me, but it has historical interest as guerrilla filmmaking. Jack Nicholson only directed three films. I give him points for a certain honesty: the student revolutionaries are a flailing, unlovely lot. Their activism is a limp, posing performance. If they were more serious they'd be setting bombs and killing people, so what are you going to do?

Bruce Dern gets to play a non-psychotic adult. If a basketball coach is an adult.

Bits of nudity, including rare male nudity when the team shake it all about in the showers. Nicholson said he wanted even more: the original plan was to open the film with a parade of male parts.

Adaptable filmmakers, they ran to a spontaneous student demonstration and used it and the arrests in the film. Made in Eugene OR.

Criterion Blu-ray.