[In the following review, Bruzzi argues that Forman glosses over the darker side of Larry Flynt's persona in The People vs. Larry Flynt, therefore lessening the importance of Flynt's First Amendment battles with the U.S. Supreme Court.]

Kentucky, 1952. Two boys, one of them Larry Flynt, manufacture and sell moonshine liquor. Twenty years later, Larry is running the Hustler go-go club, where he meets Althea Leasure, a dancer he later marries, after the Hustler ‘newsletter’ has become a commercial porn magazine and made him a millionaire. In 1972 Larry is arrested on charges of pandering obscenity and organised crime, and is defended by Alan Isaacman, who represents him in all his courtroom battles.

At his first trial, Larry is found guilty and sentenced to 25 years, but is cleared five months later. Under the persuasion of Ruth Carter Stapleton, President Jimmy Carter's sister, he undergoes a religious conversion and is baptised, only to be arrested again in 1978 for selling Hustler. Outside the Georgia courthouse, Larry and Isaacman are shot, Larry remaining paralysed from the waist down and renouncing his Christianity. He and Althea move to Hollywood where, between 1979 and 1983, they abandon the running of the magazine and descend into drug addiction. After an operation that at least rids him of pain, Larry gives up drugs and goes back to work.

In 1981 he is subpoenaed to reveal the source of a tape showing FBI agents striking a cocaine deal with John Delorean, but Flynt refuses and is sent to psychiatric prison for contempt of court. Althea discovers she has Aids. The Rev. Jerry Falwell sues Flynt for ＄40 million after Hustler runs a satirical Campari ad, but Larry counter-sues and the case comes to trial in 1984, where the lesser verdict of inflicting emotional distress is reached. Althea dies, and in 1987 Larry takes his case to the Supreme Court, who find in favour of him and freedom of speech.

The People vs. Larry Flynt never resolves its fundamental dilemma: how to make a Hollywood film about a hard core pornographer. What ensues, therefore, is an often witty and dramatic sanitisation exercise during which any potentially disruptive or dangerous elements are spruced up and subsumed into the pervasive purity of the mainstream form. These tensions are expressed in one early scene. Flynt, after castigating Playboy for mocking its readership by printing serious articles that no one, in a porn mag, is ever going to read, attends a Hustler photo shoot during which he instructs the photographer (who is striving to do something tasteful with flowers) to downplay the art and make the model's pose more explicit, concluding that, “a woman's vagina has as much morality as her face.” This, like much of the dialogue in The People vs. Larry Flynt, is very funny, but firstly, you don't get to see the morally inclined pudenda, it's tastefully smudged out; and secondly, are we really meant to believe that, in 1972, Larry Flynt would have used the word vagina? The spectre of 90s political correctness lumbers into frame.

So, what are the options left open to a classical narrative film about the king of raunchy porn? Plucked from Hollywood's vault of intellectual ideas to vulgarise and simplify comes the Marxist critic Lukács' notion of representative individuals, dramatic characters through whose conflicts greater significant socio-historical collisions can be symbolised (indeed, Forman's best US film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, is exemplary of this tactic). The 90s incarnation of Lukács' schema is the historical chronicle, and in its use of an individual's life to lend coherence to the oscillations and upheavals of the last 25 years, Larry Flynt is not unlike Forrest Gump. Although, mercifully, America's recent evolution is not charted in Forman's film via the coincidental actions of a divine fool but through an astute, engaging showman's restless fight against prudery, Flynt's life intersects with all the major political debates of the time: sexual liberation, feminism, Reaganism, evangelism, censorship. The effect of using Flynt as representative is to deproblematise his individuality, as every act of subversion (wearing the stars and stripes as a diaper in court, highlighting the humbug hypocrisy of Jerry Falwell by running an ad suggesting he has had sex with his mother) is diluted down to the same insipid message, namely that freedom of expression is the only issue.

Milos Forman's direction is heavy-handed and predictable (except for the idiosyncratic attention paid to feet skipping up courthouse stairs), and alternates between wide descriptive shots and extreme, involving close-ups. Although the film is economically structured around the two repeated scenarios of Flynt's court appearances and the Hustler editorial meetings, its monolithic uniformity elides several narrative inconsistencies. In the pursuit of homogeneity and justice the film loses track of the strong and touching love story between Larry and Althea and fails to utilise its obsession with the cheesy 70s clothes and lifestyle paraphernalia of characters who make Priest in Superfly look conservative. The excesses of design such as the rhino head, heavy baroque drapes and neurotic safe-like door that embellish Larry's millionaire's bedrooms could convey more about Hustler, Flynt and the political climate than any lawyer labouring the point of the right to free speech. The acting suffers particularly badly. For the most part Courtney Love gives an outstanding performance as the bawdy, provocative, intelligent Althea, but runs out of quirky mannerisms as her part is reduced to a stumbling, grubby, infantile cliché of a dying junkie.

Grafting the founder of Hustler onto a flag-waving exercise produces an awkward compromise, and the film is at its best when it temporarily forgets its liberal straightjacket. This largely occurs early on (before the imperialistic fetishisation of the American constitution really kicks in), when the magazine's editorial board discusses running a pornographic version of the Wizard of Oz (to which one member mumbles “some things are sacred”), or in Larry's deadpan description under cross-examination of the Hustler's Santa cartoon in which that favoured purveyor of Christmas presents brandishes his tumescent penis at Mrs Claus and says “this is what I've got to ho ho ho about.” Flynt flaunts his crudity. He is not like the middle-class editors of the British underground magazine Oz who at their 1971 trial (for amongst other things a ‘sacrilegious’ cartoon of Rupert Bear) thoughtfully gloss the prosecution lawyer's use of the word perversions as “aspects of human sexual behaviour which are rather sad.” His celebratory appropriation of tackiness is what salvages Larry. When he returns, after the wilderness drugfogged years following his paralysis, to the Hustler offices in his wheelchair wearing a jazzy lemon suit he exclaims “the pervert is back,” an announcement which the hapless receptionist reiterates in official monotone over the corporate tannoy. For all the reservations, this biopic works because Flynt's life can't be anything other than fascinating, but it's a pity that Forman marginalises the radicalism of this anarchic, frustrated pornographer who free-wheelchaired his way right up to the Supreme Court.