`FLYNT' A TWISTED TRIBUTE TO CAPITALISM, LUST AND LOVE : THE FACTS.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

Class, crass and sheer brass come together to make ``The People vs. Larry Flynt'' the most enjoyable important movie in years.

The class belongs to Milos Forman, the two-time Oscar-winning director of ``One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'' and ``Amadeus.'' The crass comes from the subject matter itself: the excessive behavior of Hustler magazine publisher and hillbilly outrage artist Flynt and his late, bisexual-stripper-drug addict wife Althea, played here with raunchy, touching lunacy by Woody Harrelson and alt-rock hellion Courtney Love.

And the brass - not just to make a major movie about an aggressively tasteless pornographer, but to turn it into a serious comedy about one of our most vital and endangered American liberties - is shared by producer Oliver Stone and writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, the ``Ed Wood'' team who conceived this whole brave and crazy enterprise.

If ``Larry Flynt'' were just a goofy biography, prurient peekaboo piece and stirring First Amendment courtroom drama, it would have more going for it than most Hollywood movies do. But it's also a bent tribute to old-fashioned capitalist initiative and a love story (equally bent) so heartfelt and tragic it makes ``The English Patient'' look like a kindergarten pageant.

Most of all, though, ``Larry Flynt'' is a perceptive social satire that's totally tuned into the longings that class, lust, money, religion, celebrity and the promise of personal freedom stir up in individuals, the hypocrisy that results and the demented, unexpected directions the exercise of all the above can take.

This great and grotesque saga began in the Kentucky backwoods, where passionate preteen entrepreneur Larry brains his daddy for dipping into his moonshine merchandise.

By the early '70s, Larry and his little brother Jimmy (Woody's little brother Brett Harrelson) are running a string of low-rent strip clubs in southern Ohio. Here he meets underage exotic dancer Althea Leasure, a vastly troubled child who's the only other human around that can match Larry's appetites for sex, money and upsetting the guardians of public decency (or, for that matter, of good sense). Hustler is born as a newsletter for the clubs, quickly makes its mark as a more explicit, working-class alternative to Playboy and Penthouse, and initiates Flynt's intimate and extended acquaintance with the judicial system.

``I'm your dream client,'' Larry slurs at one point to his long-suffering attorney, Alan Isaacman (``Primal Fear's'' Edward Norton, actually playing a composite of understandably fed-up legal counsels, not just the guy who argued Flynt's appeal against Jerry Falwell to an uncharacteristically amused Supreme Court). ``I'm the most fun, I'm rich, and I'm always in trouble.''

Indeed, what begins with local obscenity violations - Clinton strategist James Carville plays the prosecutor, ``Babe's'' James Cromwell is censorious concerned citizen and future S&L scandal figure Charles Keating, and Flynt himself plays the first judge who imprisoned him - mutates into psycho circuses, complete with court appearances in American flag diapers and the flinging of produce at judges.

Flynt's life outside of the courtroom was no less eventful or ridiculous. After Hustler becomes an unparalleled money machine, the try-anything hedonist is born again through the ministrations of no less than the president's evangelist sister, Ruth Carter Stapleton (Donna Hanover in another dizzying stroke of stunt casting - she's the wife of New York Mayor Richard Giuliani).

Then the man who based an empire on his basest urges is paralyzed from the waist down by a sniper's bullet. This leads to a tactical relocation to Los Angeles, where perverts like him can feel safe. Well, with a little assistance; Larry spends a lost half-dozen-odd years blitzed on painkillers in a bedroom protected by numerous bodyguards and an armored bank vault door. Unable to share sex with the man she adores, Althea makes the literally self-sacrificing decision to join him in pharmaceutical oblivion.

It's a mutual daze Larry eventually emerged from, sort of, to fight the good fight for free expression and unbridled vulgarity. Harrelson plays this unlikely defender of the Constitution with such addled, sleazeball determination and mood-swing ferocity, it's a wonder he remembers to always pitch Flynt as a consummate clown. His few unabashedly tender moments toward Althea are honest heartbreakers, too.

In the end, however, Harrelson's greatest act is providing support for Courtney Love. It's no exaggeration to say that Love's portrayal of Althea stands on the same ground as Nicolas Cage's work in ``Leaving Las Vegas''; it's self-destruction as an expression of supremely inventive wit, and an apparently effortless paean to passion that can only be nourished by unconditional acceptance and perversity. And as drugs and AIDS consume Althea from within, Love's outlandish grooming choices could not be more outlandish or brilliant.

In Love's case, a star is born amid the porn.

The film: ``The People vs. Larry Flynt'' (R; violence, nudity, drug use, sex).

The stars: Woody Harrelson, Courtney Love, Edward Norton, Brett Harrelson, Donna Hanover, Richard Paul.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Milos Forman. Written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. Produced by Oliver Stone, Janet Yang and Michael Hausman. Released by Columbia Pictures.

Running time: Two hours, 10 minutes.

Playing: Cineplex Odeon, Universal City; Century 14, Century City; Avco, Westwood; Broadway, Santa Monica.

Our rating: four stars.

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Photo

Photo: Woody Harrelson and Courtney Love portray husband and wife Larry and Althea in the comedy ``The People vs. Larry Flynt.''