Abbie Hoffman's Yippies provided the linguistic link between Hippies and Yuppies. "Steal This Movie" provides an untidy and frustrating but never boring look at his life and times. More than anyone else in recent American history, he was able to capture headlines and gain national attention just with the audacity of his imagination. When he announced that he and fellow Yippie Party members would levitate the Pentagon, he drew an enormous crowd--among them Norman Mailer, who confessed that although he doubted Hoffman could do it, he wanted to be there, just in case. Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover didn't get the joke, but then that was the whole point.
The movie traces the trajectory of Hoffman (played by Vincent D'Onofrio) from the early 1960s, when he was a civil rights worker in the South, to the late 1970s, when he had gone underground as "Barry Freed" and was a respected environmental campaigner in upstate New York, fighting to save the St. Lawrence River. Along the way, he married Anita (Janeane Garofalo), started a family, then fled underground into hiding.
His first family, under constant FBI surveillance, was able to meet with him from time to time, but meanwhile, as "Freed," he met and fell in love with Johanna Lawrenson (Jeanne Tripplehorn). That the two women got along fairly well and were able to share Hoffman may indicate their generosity--or maybe just that he was too much for any one woman to deal with.
That was certainly true as it became clear he was suffering from manic depression. His wild antics in the 1960s were matched by deep gloom in the 1970s, and his limitless energy and imagination might have fed from a disorder that was a boost in his earlier life, a crushing burden later (he died a suicide).
"Steal This Movie" has a title inspired by Hoffman's once-famous Steal This Book , not a title popular with its publisher. It evokes a time when it was not theft to "rip off" something, because the capitalist pigs, etc., etc. The movie, written by Bruce Graham and directed by Robert Greenwald, has an enormous amount of material to cover, and does it fairly clumsily. Information enters the screen from too many directions. Subtitles treat the material like a documentary. Spoken narration treats it as memory. Actual newsreel footage coexists with reconstructions. This is distracting at first, but the movie smooths out and finds its rhythm, and the closing passages are quite moving.
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