By David Ansen

He's the least likely man to be the hero of a big-budget Hollywood Christmas movie. He became a millionaire peddling smutty photos. He published a parody of a liquor ad that claimed Jerry Falwell had had sex with his mother in an outhouse. He was married to a bisexual former stripper who got strung out on dope and died of AIDS. He became a born-again Christian through the efforts of President Jimmy Carter's sister. He was shot by a would-be assassin and confined to a gold-plated wheelchair. He once showed up in court draped in a Stars and Stripes diaper. Millions of Americans would consider Larry Flynt the epitome of unregenerate bad taste, a redneck vulgarian whose contribution to the culture has been baneful at best.

Yet here he is, wonderfully incarnated by Woody Harrelson, as the title character of The People vs. Larry Flynt, a brave, spectacularly entertaining-and unexpectedly stirring-account of Flynt's life that asks us to regard the publisher of Hustler magazine as an invaluable champion of our First Amendment freedoms. In an era in which the big studios are less inclined than a turtle to stick their necks out-and in a season top-loaded with angelic heroes-this Milos Forman film is both provocation and anomaly.

Flynt was no angel, and the film never pretends otherwise. But he is as American as RC Cola and a Moon Pie, a fact perhaps best appreciated by an emigre filmmaker like the Czech-born Forman, who lost his parents to the Holocaust and fled the communist regime in Prague, which banned his 1967 film "The Fireman's Ball" for 20 years. The issue of free speech is not an academic matter to a director with this experience of the world, but he artfully tucks his earnestness within folds of Old World irony. In "The People vs. Larry Flynt," comedy and tragedy frolic together with surprising abandon, as Forman confronts the gaudy excesses of a life out of control.

What a circus it was, from the hardscrabble hills of Kentucky, where we first glimpse little Larry selling moonshine to an old drunk-neatly anticipating his future capitalist zeal-to the halls of the U.S. Supreme Court, where the Reverend Falwell's case against Flynt is finally argued. Screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, whose mastery of quirky, marginal subjects was evident in "Ed Wood," pick up the story as Flynt is running a seedy Cincinnati strip club, whose "newsletter" grows up to be Hustler. Flynt instinctively saw his skin mag as an antidote to the upwardly mobile pretensions of Playboy. (This is the rare American movie that takes note of our class structure.) It's at the club that he meets the young stripper Althea Leasure (Courtney Love), a girl whose libido and ambition match his own.

For this is also, improbably and movingly, a love story. Larry and Althea have no interest in monogamy-group sex is their thing-but their commitment to each other, which extends even through both of their subsequent drug addictions, never flags. Love's performance is an amazement. Funny, unfettered and almost scarily alive in front of a camera, she's the definition of a "natural." In much the same way that Althea inspires Larry (the sexual and entrepreneurial impulses seem interlocked in the guy), Love's quicksilver presence seems to coax out of Harrelson his most robust performance. Alternately charming and obnoxious, shrewd and irrational, his Flynt fascinates, appalls and disarms us.

Of all the sideshows in Flynt's preposterous odyssey, his religious conversion is perhaps the strangest and least satisfying passage in the movie-the one Flyntian mystery the filmmakers can't penetrate. But when dealing with Flynt's myriad flamboyant legal battles, the movie has a field day. As Flynt tells his long-suffering lawyer (the excellent Edward Norton) late in the game when the lawyer tries to quit, "I'm your dream client! I'm the most fun, I'm rich and I'm always in trouble."

He is also, by this point, addled by painkillers, confined to his wheelchair (after both he and his lawyer have been shot outside a Georgia courthouse) and holed up in a grandly tacky high-security Hollywood mansion where he and Althea descend into a reclusive, narcotic stupor that can be harrowing to behold. In the potent homestretch, the private and public stories strikingly come together, as Flynt's lawyer eloquently pleads his disreputable client's case to the Supreme Court while our ravaged antihero, having gained and lost just about everything he ever wanted, sorts through the wreckage and the triumphs of his life. That Forman has found the raucous, satirical side of Larry Flynt's story doesn't surprise us; that he has uncovered its pathos, and something that could even be considered its patriotism, is a stunning achievement.

Forman didn't originate this project (which was an Oliver Stone Ixtlan Production), but he made it his own. Think of the infantile, vulgarian Mozart in his Oscar-winning "Amadeus," or the outcast McMurphy in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," and it is easy to see the line that threads toward Larry Flynt. But it was his own firsthand experience of censorship that helped him identify with Flynt's saga. "I've lived long enough in totalitarian regimes," Forman says, "in a society where the censorship was rampant and the freedom of the press was practically abolished, that I know what kind of a devastating effect that has, how it chokes creativity in all fields. This country has never lived under a totalitarian regime, so we have a tendency to take freedom of speech for granted. And that's dangerous. I really believe the line in the film: this country is the strongest in the world not because it's the richest or biggest or smartest, but because it's the freest. Censorship is bad enough, but even worse is the self-censorship which it provokes. Because you start to tamper with your own honesty. And subsequently you are not who you are."

Flynt was never less than wholly himself. Forman doesn't glorify this intransigent, abrasive man, but he has mounted a rousing and persuasive case for the defense.

With Yahlin Chang

12/23/96