Jerry Maguire.

PLAINLY put, I find The People vs. Larry Flynt the best and most important American film of the year. It is the story of the publisher of Hustler magazine, not unlike the way it happened, save for the usual, near-inevitable cinematic embellishments. The magazine and its publisher being considered unsavory in most quarters, this presumed glorification of Flynt has aroused the ire of feminists, conservatives, and persons of exacting taste.

Glorification? Well, yes, whenever a real person is the protagonist of a major-studio biographical film, the presumption is that he or she is being celebrated, or at least dignified, by it. Were, then, all those old-time gangster movies about Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and the rest cases of glorification? Fascination, rather: evil fascinates, especially when accompanied by courage, or at least audacity. If you add the prevalent sociological view, whereby the individual is innocent, and society is to blame, the moral issues become cloudier yet.

The movie under discussion, however, works on several levels. It is first a First Amendment tale about what led to Flynt's winning his case against the Moral Majority's Jerry Falwell in the United States Supreme Court, with Chief Justice Rehnquist himself writing the decision. The man widely regarded as a pornographer had published a mock advertisement, according to which Falwell's "first time" was in an outhouse, and with his mother. There was a suit and a countersuit, and in the end the highest tribunal in the land, which could have ignored the case, found for Flynt.

The People vs. Larry Flynt is a resounding vindication of free speech in America, something that cannot be tested in a nonsubversive or inoffensive context. The Larry Flynt of the movie is funny and charming, but he is also brash and crude, and has incessant, indiscriminate sex. Moreover, he prides himself on publishing nothing like the "high-class" pornography of Playboy, where the girlie pictures are interspersed with articles on how to install quadraphonic stereo systems, and the like. His is a pornography for the common, nonaffluent man, with women's sexual organs closely scrutinized. In short, bare skin at the maximum, socially redeeming stuff at the barest minimum.

But the film is also a love story, however odd. Running a sleazy nightclub and strip-joint in Cincinnati, Larry auditions a very young aspiring performer who calls herself Althea Leasure, and he takes a liking to her. Soon she is in his office for closer scrutiny; there is some sassy talk and, next, the two hit the sack. As Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski have written this scene, as Milos Forman directed it, and as Woody Harrelson and Courtney Love enact it, it is droll, whimsical, sexy, without a single shot a censor could object to. And that is how most of the film is: good dialogue and direction, idiomatic performances, and virtually no visible flesh. Only at the end do we see Althea nude, by which time she is dead, submerged in her bathtub: a blueish waxen doll, infinitely sad.

Larry lives with and, after a comic proposal scene, eventually marries Althea, who is bisexual; despite separate sexual agendas, they are rollickingly happy with each other. Things go bad only after someone who is never caught shoots Larry and his lawyer, and the publisher becomes paralyzed from the waist down. Larry, in continual pain, becomes dependent on drugs; Althea becomes a drug addict out of sexual deprivation, and eventually contracts AIDS. Her psychological and physiological deterioration is brilliantly conveyed without any dialogue, only through her ever more outlandish getups, her increasingly bizarre behavior, and her intensifying physical weakness. The decline is enormously moving.

This is also a film about publishing, with the various Hustler story conferences made riotously funny. For example, Althea suggests a nudie photo spread involving the Wizard of Oz characters, whose identities she has difficulties remembering. Though generally approved, her final, "there's Toto, maybe, even," elicits a shocked, "Some things are sacred." There is also a curious town meeting, and there are several hilarious trial scenes, one of them slightly marred when a dignified black judge, having had Flynt gagged, proposes taking "the gag off of you." Is this solecism the character's, the actor's, or the writers'?

This is a film, also, about the enduring and endearing, but not unruffled, friendship between Larry and Alan Isaacman, his lawyer. A film in which a lawyer is a highly sympathetic figure --especially as played by the talented and prepossessing Edward Norton -- is somewhat of a curiosity right there. Ingeniously presented, too, is the friendship between Flynt and Ruth Carter Stapleton, Jimmy Carter's evangelist sister, played compellingly by Donna Hanover, Mayor Giuliani's wife. We are never allowed to figure out the exact nature of the nexus, girt as it is with riveting ambiguities. But Flynt's staff is mightily relieved when the boss finally announces, "The reign of Christian terror is over. We are porn again."

There is a splendid opening scene with little Larry and his even smaller brother making and selling moonshine; a wonderful prison visit by Althea to her jailed husband; and any number of fine throwaway bits, as when we cut from Larry's hope to "move somewhere where perverts are welcome," to helicopter shots of what looks like a dream city until the HOLLYWOOD sign betrays its problematic identity. There are various lagniappes: Larry's brother, Jimmy, is aptly portrayed by Woody's real-life brother, Brett Harrelson; James Carville appears as the prosecutor Simon Leis; Crispin Glover contributes a pungent bit as the one-eyed Arlo, a Flynt associate; Larry Flynt himself plays Flynt's most hostile judge.

Finally, though, this is a directorial triumph: the film has an infectiously brisk tempo, a savvy sense of alternating light and darkness (cinematographers don't come any better than Philippe Rousselot), and exemplary economy in telling its story. The scene of Isaacman arguing the case before the Supreme Court is dazzlingly staged, what with Edward Norton reminiscent of Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the actors portraying the Justices impeccably chosen, and some particularly awesome shots of them from behind, the backs of their majestic armchairs looming darkly like a mountain range at nightfall. Not even in his pre-Hollywood glory days in Prague did Forman do anything better.

There are also fictitious hustlers, one of whom is the hero of another, less good but not inconsiderable Hollywood movie, Jerry Maguire -- as it were, a Jerry for a Larry. Tom Cruise plays the sports-agent hero who, for a moment of reckless honesty, is dumped by both his agency and, eventually, his fiancee. Outmaneuvered by his former partners, he can hang onto only one client, a black wide receiver played superbly by the somewhat undersized Cuba Gooding Jr. Also leaving with him is a mousy secretary with a secret crush on him.

The story, written and directed by Cameron Crowe, develops along conventional lines and is overlong, what with several successive endings. But it features Cruise's best performance to date, a little sleaze suiting him better than his customary heroics. As the secretary who wins, drops, and recovers him, the newcomer Renee Zellweger is delightfully natural and vivacious, and other roles are also well taken. The dialogue, based on much research, sounds authentic, and the world of sports agents and players is novel and interesting. The movie has an adult feel to it, and that, for today's Hollywood, is quite a bit.