DREAR ABBIE.

THOMAS FRANK ON STEAL THIS MOVIE!

I DON'T REMEMBER precisely when I first learned to equate Grateful Dead fandom with class privilege, when I finally figured out that those hokey dancing bears glued to the rear window of a Saab signaled that you were tailgating a pleasure-loving scion of American entitlement, but it must have been around the same time that Abbie Hoffman, having resurfaced after a decade underground, was beginning to dabble in the hopeless leftist causes of the '80s. This unhappy coincidence was no doubt what provoked my first glimmers of doubt concerning the '60s counterculture.

Yes, there was something genuinely inspiring about Hoffman's deeds in the '60s, though I only knew about his exploits later, through books and old TV footage. And yes, I wanted deeply to believe, as Hoffman had, that rock music harbored some profound revolutionary potential, that youth culture represented something more than the demographic advertisers are keenest to reach. But by the '80s, the bands that had once seemed so menacing to the established order were just a bunch of long-haired millionaires locking horns in a pointless culture war with a bunch of short-haired millionaires, the issues between them boiling down to whether a millionaire could snort a little coke when he felt like it or whether a millionaire ought to be going to church instead. If there was revolution to be found in youth culture, it clearly resided in the then-still-vibrant postpunk scene. But the '60s? Who's surprised anymore when they hear the billionaires of Silicon Valley couch their libertarian politics in the language of the W oodstock generation, or when they read that George W. Bush's chief media consultant is a nightclub-owning hipster with a Dead sticker on his SUV? No, the only ones still interested in promoting the counterculture as a truly revolutionary moment are the ones who profit by it: Hollywood, where the great lifestyle emancipation of those years could never be exaggerated; and religious conservatives, for whom the '60s remain a vivid memory of Satan's recent reign on earth, a talisman to be waved every four years to snap the faithful back into line.

That Abbie Hoffman was able to foresee the commodification of his revolution, at least to a degree, is part of what makes him such a compelling figure. To be sure, Hoffman was one of the worst abusers of the language of the Manichaean '60s: His 1969 book Woodstock Nation is filled with denunciations of "Amerikan" "pig" civilization and overheated celebrations of hip culture. He sometimes seemed genuinely to believe that pleasure alone, people doing their own thing, would overturn The System. But he also had moments of real acuity. Woodstock Nation, for example, contains a very funny account of how representatives of the Fortune 500 fastened on youth culture as a new way to move product--not to mention some rather caustic comments about the entrepreneurial backers of the Woodstock festival itself. (It is revealing to compare Hoffman's humorous, often knowing, always deeply personal writing to that of his sometime colleague Jerry Rubin, who seems to have spent the '60s cranking out one preposterous, mock-threa tening proclamation of youth revolutionary power after another.)

Hoffman's life embraced massive, tragic contradictions: The radical movement he believed was flowering in the late '60s quickly came to terms with the "establishment" Hoffman so hated. And although he himself became famous as a sort of political outlaw, his politics was always indistinct. Widely reviled by the right as chief of the cop taunters, he was also, oddly, something of an all-American--a star athlete, a scrappy street kid, a person of conscience, ingenuity, and charisma--the kind of person we are taught as schoolchildren to revere. What made it all work, at least for a little while, was Hoffman's monumental sense of humor, his world-class provocations: He tore up money on television; he showed up places with that unthinkable word "fuck" Magic Markered on his forehead; and he cofounded a joke political party whose very name is still capable of annoying the politically engaged: Yippies.

Unfortunately, one gets little sense of Abbie's complexity from Steal This Movie!, Robert Greenwald's new film biography of Hoffman, which opens nationally this month. Here all is black and white, good and bad. Although much of the dialogue is taken verbatim from Abbie's various written works, one can't help but think it would have been more apt as a biography of the strident Jerry Rubin. Likewise, the film's square, conformist, law 'n' order badmen aren't so much powers to be outmaneuvered or confronted as they are evil robots bent on repressing the fun-loving Abbie by any means necessary. They repeatedly beat him up. They spy on him and contrive nasty plots that are revealed to the audience by sinister computer printouts. One scene actually depicts these forces of malevolence as they receive their orders, standing at attention in look-alike dark suits before huge portraits of their monstrous masters, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon. Hilarious caricatures of Hoover's and Nixon's voices punctu ate the film with ee-vill. But the problem with the movie isn't that it has invented a massive conspiracy against Hoffman, purely for dramatic effect. The FBI's COINTELPRO operation, its systematic infiltration and disruption of radical groups and harassment of targeted activists (including Hoffman), is by now well documented. The problem is the way the movie depicts the conspiracy--that is, in such broad, cartoonish strokes that the true story seems to have been made up, purely for dramatic effect.

There is also little sense in this biopic of the historical weirdness of Hoffman's effort to graft radical politics onto the youth culture of the era: It's just assumed that long hair and rock music were in fact as radical and subversive as the hideous squares of the era seemed to believe. Even Abbie's funnier pranks--like his disruption of trading at the New York Stock Exchange by tossing dollar bills into the pit--are presented here in a hectoring tone, as though the final goal of all this was just to infuriate the men in suits. And before long the politics is abruptly forgotten as Abbie takes an assumed name, goes underground, and succumbs to paranoia--which sends the film spiraling off into one of those long meditations on the problems of personal identity more typical of made-for-TV movies.

One can't fault the cast of Steal This Movie! for the film's various shortcomings. Vincent D'Onofrio may have trouble with Abbie's New England accent, but he's irrepressibly energetic in the leading role. Janeane Garofalo, playing Abbie's wife Anita, manages to be both hardened and endearing, giving the movie its only character with any complexity. And one has to salute the film's makers for the marvelously quixotic idea behind the movie. While the rest of the world thrills to whatever big-money Cruisery happens to be on offer this summer, they decided that the thing to do was to make a sympathetic account of the career of a figure who is now treated with skepticism even by those largely in tune with his cause.

But the movie's two-dimensional moral setting badly muddles some of the era's more important questions. What undid the '60s, as this movie presents the facts, was what undid Abbie himself: government plots and disinformation. That is why the Movement failed to transform America. But, of course, neither Hoffman's demise nor the counterculture's failure can be explained simply--and it's a pity Steal This Movie! missed history's parallel plotline. Even while a massive and still-living backlash was taking form in the wake of Abbie's japes at the Democratic Convention in 1968, his treasured notion of "cultural revolution" was quickly being appropriated by Madison Avenue and Hollywood. In fact, if you define "cultural revolution" as public obscenity and pissing off the suits, it is the market that is the worst offender here, not the nation's dwindling handful of leftists. Just step into the next theater over at the twelve-plex, and you're almost certain to see something infinitely more offensive and disturbing tha n this montage of fond memories of a really nice guy.

Thomas Frank, editor of The Baffler, is the author of One Market Under God, forthcoming from Doubleday.