Movies

Brett Morgen's absurdly engaging docudrama Chicago 10 has a mission: to jolt inert young audiences of the early 21st century into fresh outrage and activism. The film is Grade-A agitpop, a mixture of archival footage and cheeky, creative animated reconstruction that's funny and frightening in equal measure. Forget the R rating; if your kids want to know what the '60s were about, here's a start.

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The docudrama Chicago 10 uses animation to re-create scenes from the trial of activists accused of inciting riots at the Democratic National Convention in 1968.

In August 1968, anti-war protesters and disaffected college kids descended on Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, intent on bringing their message to Middle America via the news media. Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley sent in the riot squad; four days of street battles followed.

Eight months later, President Richard Nixon's new attorney general, John Mitchell, put the activists he considered responsible on trial in a Chicago federal courtroom, charging them with conspiracy and crossing state lines with intent to incite riot.

Mr. Morgen stitches together historical footage without resorting to narration or talking heads. Because no cameras were allowed at the trial itself, Chicago 10 animates the court transcripts using voice actors and the semi-photorealistic cartoon style of movies like Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly.

The collision between straight America and the counterculture has never seemed more surreal. The conflict is personified in the showdown between Bobby Seale (Jeffrey Wright) and Judge Julius Hoffman, whose querulous voice is provided by the late Roy Scheider. Mr. Seale wanted to represent himself, Hoffman refused, Mr. Seale made an angry stand for his constitutional rights, and Hoffman had the defendant tied to a chair, silenced with a gag and knocked around by bailiffs.

It was at that moment the government lost its case, and Chicago 10 gives us the stark visual correlative: a black man bound to a chair in an American courtroom, beaten for trying to speak his piece.

The defendants are seen as heroes not because of what they did but where they drew the line, saying: If you cross here, you're no longer fighting for freedom but against it. Chicago 10 implicitly prompts a viewer to wonder where his or her own line is. Better yet, it makes you question what, if anything, you're doing about it.