By Eric Kohn

Chicago 10
Directed by Brett Morgen

With the desperate street theater enshrouding the last Republican National Convention already looking like a retreating nightmare, political protestation has surely entered a new era. Whether he’s pure rhetoric or the real thing, Barack Obama gets crowds bouncing with a positive streak: The “Yes We Can!” campaign has an inclusive ring that such polarizing edicts as “Four More Years” can’t touch. Finally, feisty young liberals can dance to an upbeat tune. The question of how long until the record starts skipping is secondary to whether or not it means anything in the first place. Chicago 10, Brett Morgen’s highly original documentary about the Yippie massacre outside the Democratic National Convention of 1968, reminds us that this isn’t the first time vivacity, rather than urgency, dictated activism.  

A complicated mixture of archival footage and rotoscoped performances, Chicago 10 focuses on the ill-fated day when a crowd of thousands descended upon the convention and the ensuing trial that brought Abbie Hoffman, with his merry band of satirists, into national regard. There was no camera in the courtroom, but the transcript still exists, so director Brett Morgen  decided to restage the events with a handful of noted actors (Hank Azaria, Nick Nolte and the late Roy Scheider among them) and give the occasion a contemporary beat. The performances are digitized, outlined and colored, conveying the plausible notion that the misguided judicial proceedings amounted to hardly more than a cartoon.

The story of the trial, during which Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and the rest of the gang pit their comic wits against a cantankerous judge, carries its own built-in sensationalism. But Morgen  still manages to bring his own style to the myth. In The Kid Stays in the Picture, his 2002 portrait of Hollywood powerhouse Robert Evans, playful animations underscored the producer’s crazed anecdotes. In Chicago 10, the animated sequences free the movie from a procedural talking-head show, creating an oddly hypnotizing affair that suggests a mix of Looney Tunes and Law & Order. The camera swirls through the room in impossible positions, liberated by technology to roam the judicial circus.

The technique brings a sense of levity to the situation, but that’s the idea. Morgen  displays obvious admiration for the Yippies’ festive mentality in the shadow of authority, but he makes a valiant effort to avoid treating them as relics. The modern perspective is right in the title: History records the trial as an incident involving seven defendants. But Bobby Seale, the eighth member of the bunch, ended up getting tried on separate charges. His harsh treatment in the courtroom—the judge had the African-American protestor bound and gagged after he spoke up to defend himself—looks like an invention, but transcripts prove otherwise. The defense attorneys, whose role in the matter remains as substantial as the wild-eyed men they fronted, fill the other two slots. Consequently, Chicago 10 represents a fresh snapshot of the affair—a post-punk renewal of hippie enlightenment. 

Morgen  doesn’t stop there. He uses a soundtrack of late-20th-century music, from Rage Against the Machine to Eminem. His intentions here don’t yield the best results. It’s frequently difficult to focus on the carefully constructed sense of place when the jarring tunes constantly insist that this is happening now. The argument works better when Chicago 10 remains, at least to some degree, in the past. This allows us to observe it as a complete structure, rather than one that continues to evolve—since that’s just not the case. Important questions are raised, but for all the boldness of its design, Chicago 10 falls short of providing a solution.