Stay Hungry (1976, Bob Rafelson) (Patreon)

62/100

Don't know anything about Rafelson's background, but I'm now quite curious about what drew him to tales of young men who reject inherited wealth and privilege to seek out working-class authenticity. Unlike Five Easy Pieces, which opens with Bobby already working in the oil fields (and treats his former life as a shocking twist of sorts), Stay Hungry observes every stage of its protagonist's gradual, somewhat inadvertent metamorphosis, allowing him to keep one foot in each world for most of the film. Gotta say I never entirely bought Bridges as the snooty scion that he's initially meant to embody, even though the actor's of course Hollywood royalty in real life—too many subsequent rebellious roles, maybe (we're talking about The Dude here), plus there's just something inherently relaxed about his persona. And that does make Craig's trajectory feel a bit pre-ordained. The offbeat milieu that seduces him, however, is a hoot, melding Mr. Universe, and gym culture generally, with jawin' and fiddlin' that would fit snugly in a Les Blank documentary. Sally Field deftly sidesteps spunky-Southern-gal cliché—it's a turn ferociously iconoclastic enough that I'd have assumed, had I not known otherwise, that Rafelson found a local non-pro—and Schwarzenegger, who's both much more prominent and considerably less "as himself" than I'd imagined, delivers a genuine, quite solid performance, aided by how fundamentally weird Joe Santo is in many respects (most notably the respect that sees him not-very-subtly orchestrate everyone's sex lives). By the time Craig blithely steals a painting from an office building, only to give it away upon discovering that Mary Tate mistook sunflowers for a lion, I was smitten.

And then the movie went straight into the toilet, with a vehemence that I can't recall having seen for some time. Whether or not gym owner Thor Erikson's climactic drug-fueled rampage has a proper place in Charles Gaines' source novel, I cannot say; onscreen, the character just sort of suddenly explodes into deranged prominence out of nowhere, with R.G. Armstrong encouraged to go way over the top. And that tonally disruptive outrageousness leads to outright silliness: dozens of competition-clad bodybuilders running onto the street in search of their prize money, then getting distracted by the public and striking musclebound poses atop moving buses and so forth. Might've been hilarious in a different movie, but it clangs hard in this one—particularly because Rafelson and/or Gaines uses the mayhem as an excuse to reconcile Craig and Mary Tate without him acknowledging in any way his previous ill-treatment of her. He just comes to the rescue and they live happily ever after. On top of which, dialogue abruptly turns overly emphatic ("Is it authentic enough for you back here" Joe asks Craig) and the film's true antagonists are revealed to be utterly toothless. Rarely can one draw such an impermeable dividing line between a film's excellence and its wretchedness; apart from the question of whether Bridges was miscast, I have nothing bad to say about Stay Hungry up until the point at which Jabo bribes Thor with sex workers, and nothing good to say about anything that happens afterward (except perhaps that it's kinda funny to watch someone dodge flying weights and barbells). Halfway through, I wondered why this isn't deemed a classic on Five Easy Pieces' level. By the end, I understood.