The result is a small film, nothing genre-defining or worthy of film school scrutiny, but a solid, well-made movie with calm, effective performances and rich character development.

Kris Kristofferson debuts as the title character, a washed up music star who deals drugs to get by. The film opens with him attempting to pawn his guitar, saying that he’s given up dealing, a scene that immediately gives him a degree of likeability not seen in the era’s more memorable, yet savage, characters.

With two strikes against him, and facing five years in prison upon his next arrest (“That’s a long time between drinks”), Cisco gives up dealing, ready to settle down with his girlfriend (Karen Black). With certain, all-too-familar blight, he’s blackmailed into dealing again by a crooked cop, played by Gene Hackman in a surprising and funny departure from his usually tense cop outings.

Hackman’s cop, needing cash, somehow found a hundred kilos of pot, and having arrested Cisco twice before, knows he is the man to sell it. He offers to erase one of his strikes if he complies, and threatens to add a third if anything goes wrong, pure ‘70s cop autonomy at its finest. The remainder of the film follows Cisco as he tries to get the money in time, while also facing his disapproving girlfriend and strung-out former band mate (Harry Dean Stanton).

Stanton gives the standout performance in the film, as a simpler, rock bottom, more sympathetic version of Cisco, but he doesn’t enter until the latter part of the movie. Hackman is also barely there, playing big parts in the beginning and end of the film, but only popping up once in between.

The most surprising performance comes from the unreliable Kristofferson, who plays Cisco with a relaxed confidence rarely seen in musicians-turned-actors, especially those with massive drinking problems. Most impressively, he seems fully in control of the character, playing a drug dealer under deadline with a gripping numbness uncharacteristic of both the genre and the decade.

The film’s on-location attitude helps it function as a gritty sightseeing tour of Los Angeles, but it never exploits the city like The French Connection or Serpico did with New York. By the end of those films, the city itself feels like the most unpredictable, beastly character, but Cisco Pike is more concerned with actual people than it is with skewering L.A. culture. One scene in a recording studio, where an exec is much more interested in Cisco’s drugs than his music, takes some shots at the record industry, but music is at most a minor theme in a movie concerned more with front-end action than social conscience and allegory.

The film’s success stems from the minimalist stage for the performances set by director Bill L. Norton, who does little to get in the way of the actors, aside from dropping in a few country-rock tunes, some sung by Kristofferson himself. To the point of its unnecessary, contrived ending, the plot is agile and straightforward, paced by tame editing and no-frills camerawork. Maybe Norton was still smoking Cisco’s stash while the rest of Hollywood was discovering cocaine?

While The French Connection rocketed William Friedkin to quickly-squandered stardom and Mean Streets lit the wick on Martin Scorsese’s legendary career, Norton made one other recognizable film, More American Graffiti, and then faded to a life in television, now having gone 20 years without a theatrical release. But his approach in Cisco Pike is notable for its refusal to give in to the frantic stylistic whims of the times (1972 also saw the release of The Godfather and Deliverance). Instead, he took a laid back look at a story that’s anything but mild.)

-Shawn Wines