If the title sounds a bit dry and grim, don't worry--this movie is anything but. How could it be, with a cast that includes Woody Harrelson as Larry Flynt, Courtney Love as his bisexual junkie wife Althea, and Edward Norton as a composite of their lawyers? Director Milos Forman brings his trademark offbeat humor and affection for vividly defined, marginal characters to a biography of the notorious founder of the Hustler magazine empire. Unlike Hugh Hefner at Playboy, or even Bob Guccione at Penthouse, Flynt had no upscale pretensions. He made Hustler as raunchy, tasteless, and offensive as he could, and America both bought the publication and despised him for it. Although presented as a kind of live-action political cartoon, the movie presents the incredible true story of how a backwards backwoods Kentucky boy made a fortune selling smut in the American heartland, was repeatedly jailed for obscenity, paralyzed by a sniper's bullet, got zonked out of his mind on painkillers, and yet wound up with a landmark freedom of speech case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Forman, who left the political repression of his native Czechoslovakia in 1968 after the Soviet invasion, has described his ebullient (but serious) American comedy as a celebration of the First Amendment, and you can feel his perverse delight shining through in every scene. He convinces us that any constitution that protects the rights of a vulgar pariah like Flynt isn't a failure; it is a cause for rejoicing. Flynt represents the price of freedom, and it is a price well worth paying. The screenplay by Ed Wood writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who seem to excel at creating ambivalent portraits of disreputable figures, entertainingly explores the contradictory emotions and complex moral dilemmas that the Bill of Rights was meant to inspire--as if Frank Capra had been a card-carrying member of the ACLU. --Jim Emerson
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