The Weather Underground

This is an excellent documentary about the Weather Underground, the radical and sometimes violent offshoot of ’60s activist group Students for a Democratic Society. Following up on the various members years after they’ve given up homemade explosives and free-love orgies, filmmakers Sam Green and Bill Seigel try to figure out what led a bunch of hippies to become so criminally sophisticated that they were able to stage a successful jailbreak, invade FBI headquarters and generally get away with mayhem. Stock footage and interviews are expertly woven together, and the wildly different responses of the surviving members show the wide range of reasons that can draw someone to abandon the rule of law. While almost universally derided by the right, some on the left felt this movie wasn’t sympathetic enough to the member’s cause. In this case, pissing off both ends of the spectrum is indicative of the aesthetic success of the film, which manages to distance itself from its subject without losing sight of its values.