Steal This Movie!

If nothing else, Steal This Movie! provides an invaluable service in educating a new generation about the man, the myth, and the manic depression that was Abbie Hoffman. Unfortunately, that's also the film's biggest problem; for the first half, it feels less like a movie and more like an episode of A&E's Biography. Director Robert Greenwald chooses to tell the story of the Sixties' most flamboyant activist via interviews and flashbacks with those who knew and loved him. Hoffman's wife, Anita (played by Janeane Garofalo), leads us through Hoffman's life: through his early, coat-and-tie-wearing days with the SDS, then to his later, Yippie incarnation when he more perfectly realized his enthralling combination of straight-up political protest and headline-grabbing theatrics (nominating a pig to the presidency at the 1968 Democratic convention one of the more potent examples). During these flashbacks, Greenwald constantly cuts to actual documentary footage from the protests, and shoots the “movie” parts in a similar grainy fashion so that there is almost no telling what's “real” and what's not. It leaves the audience with the same feeling provoked by any news clip of a cop beating to bloodiness a defenseless victim -- a vague horror and a rage at the injustice, but still something terribly impersonal. Once Greenwald finally discards the interview/flashbacks (a truly uninspired framing device that succeeds only in distancing us from the material), we begin to finally know the characters. The latter half of Steal This Movie! follows Hoffman as he goes underground (fleeing a drug charge and a CIA campaign to terrorize him into submission). In this half, the characters finally flesh out, due to some really great performances. Garofalo quietly mesmerizes as the ceaselessly strong wife to an (arguably self-styled) martyr, and she displays a previously unseen radiance as the happy bride. Tripplehorn matches her shot for shot as the second love of Hoffman's life, the woman he meets while underground as Barry Freed. Indie regular Corrigan, as fellow activist Jerry Rubin, and a forceful Pollak round out the cast of characters who fought alongside Hoffman. None of them are given nearly enough screen time, and particularly frustrating is the tendency of the screenplay (by Bruce Graham) to shortchange the characters. It's never explained why Rubin and Hoffman split in ideology and action, nor is there any real attempt to explain how Anita Hoffman felt about her husband's abandonment of her and their son. Even Hoffman's suicide at the age of 52 is addressed only in a one-line blurb at film's end. In any case, the actors make do quite well with the little they have to work with, and any one of the supporting players could have easily, er, stolen this movie if it weren't for the absolute dominance of D'Onofrio. Although it takes a while to get used to his somewhat spotty accent, D'Onofrio displays an amazing physicality here, alternately hulking then leonine, and always sexual. Underneath the brilliant, savage, and showboating icon, he reveals a passionate and passionately flawed man. Too bad the movie about him is just as flawed.