Drive, He Said Details

In the mid-sixties Jack Nicholson took a shine to Jeremy Larner's novel, which fused basketball (one of Nicholson's obsessions) with the activities of campus radicals during the escalation of the Vietnam War. Five years later, and two years after Easy Rider, Nicholson had become a star but realised he couldn't play a basketball star. So he turned director and delivered this funky piece, which has lofty ambitions but never quite comes together. It is, however, a far greater achievement than radical rivals The Strawberry Statement and Zabriskie Point, and there's a fascinating cast, including Nicholson's friends Robert Towne, who wrote Chinatown, Karen Black and Bruce Dern.

Flabby celebration of against-the-government attitudes, expressed partly through sex and bad language. Defiantly hard to like.