Seasoned radicals might counsel that you can't fuel a movement on rage, and no doubt that's true. Still, the signs are all around us that staying angry is underrated. Road rage, turf wars, and people beating the shit out of girlfriends and children are popular enough. But the kind of fury and revolt that cause you to risk security, risk your future, devote your days and nights to aligning your actions to your beliefs – in the face of creeping change, missteps, and giant leaps backward – is rarer and harder to sustain, for reasons too obvious to go into.

Seen in this light, the arc of German filmmaker Barbara Teufel's Gallant Girls is just as inevitable as protest fatigue. Part documentary, part drama, the film is an accounting of the years between 1987 and 1991 in the West Berlin district of Kreuzberg, as lived through by a group of anarchist punks battling the state, the press, and the International Monetary Fund. Teufel, who narrates, interweaves present-day conversations with her former comrades, archival footage of protests and riots, and fictionalized re-creations by younger actors to portray a period in which these people worked and lived together and devoted themselves to radical change, then spread out into the world as the wall fell down and capitalism flooded through to the east, dashing their hopes.

The result is something like an autobiographical documentary. At the start of the film, you see actors sifting through costumes, looking for clothes that will suggest the prevailing "feminist aesthetic," as one male interviewee puts it. You see the commune set before the Venceremos poster goes up, before it takes on the trappings of a place where a mixed group of radicals slept and ate and argued and strategized. In particular Teufel turns her camera on herself and six other women who banded together at that time, depicting their political work, their attacks on the patriarchy (embodied, often, by their male comrades, who eventually get booted from the flat), and their attempts to survive daily life according to their beliefs (rejecting wage labor in principle, they take jobs as cleaning women to pay the rent).

A young woman named Bonnie (a stand-in for Teufel) comes to Berlin to visit a friend in her commune and stays on an impulse, following a possible sign, or possibly personal inclinations (there are washed-out, music video-esque scenes during which she and a fellow anarchist, who looks like her doppelgänger in masculine form, have sex and feed each other strawberries on a rooftop amid wind-whipped sheets). In 1987 an annual May Day street party morphs into a street reclamation in which thousands of the city's inhabitants set fires, battle the cops, and liberate the food from the shelves of the supermarkets. Spurred, seemingly by Bonnie (who is spurred, seemingly, by a lover's quarrel involving a knife and some really cheesy dialogue), a group of women try out lesbianism via manifesto – labryses doled out upon conversion – and transform themselves into knights.

It's hard to tell where fiction runs out and autobiography takes over. The riot was real, but the names are changed, biographical details blurred and shared, meaning the seven women interviewed in the present day bear an indistinct relation to the actors who play die Ritterinnen, or "gallant girls," after the street (Ritterstrasse, or Knight Street) where they form their all-women commune. The film takes the night of the riots as a turning point, when Bonnie and the others get a taste of what they might be capable of, banded together.

Committed to the job of revolutionaries, the anarchists Bonnie meets in Berlin stridently declare romantic love nothing more than a bourgeois suburban construct – a viewpoint they have trouble staying true to for weeks at a time, let alone years in the scene. They're able to laugh at their own dictates, but the dictates remain. And yet what could be more romantic, in the older sense of the word, than turning oneself into an errant knight? A recurring scene shows the seven women – punks with flying colored hair and dreadlocks, boots and leather jackets, and beaming smiles – running in slow motion toward the camera. Their energy is so brilliant it's enough to set fire to the streets. Being part of such a vanguard, you might feel you had some years to give everything.

Everything doesn't last. Disheartened by what she considers to be a failed campaign against the IMF, Bonnie – who seems like a somewhat restless type – later watches the fires in the streets of Kreuzberg and calls them "gestures, rituals, predictable in practical terms," "the opposite of revolt." May 1987 never repeated itself again, she says, and "what looked spectacular just got on our nerves." Given the opportunity to see the same volatile gestures repeated and the same political structures and societal ills in place the next day and the next month and the next year, she comes to conclusions that might seem familiar to a thousand other fighters like her.

One of Teufel's former comrades talks about the megalomania of a small group of outsiders thinking they could change anything. The way Teufel sees it, the way the story unravels, after a few tight-knit years in which they devoted themselves to the meetings and the campaigns, the gallant girls simply started looking around them, and the threads began to come off. You could call it what happens when the personal intrudes on the political. You could call it a car wreck. In the days leading up to the IMF protests, when Bonnie is interviewed on the radio and asked about their intentions, she says they plan to hound the men in the gray suits until they go home "exhausted and demoralized." The IMF campaign had an impact, especially in the longer view, but it's painful to face the facts of who demoralized whom.

Yet it's hard not to sympathize or at least understand – most of what the gallant girls turn to is an extension of the passions they brought to the group, including the film degree Bonnie eventually pursues (internal conflict over that decision very possibly served as seed material for this picture). And most of the real-life gallant girls have found ways to put their political passions to the service of relevant work.

By the end, the wall has fallen and the scene has split between Kreuzberg and the emptied-out buildings in the east of the city. By the end, it's just their backs we're seeing as they run away from the camera, as they move out of sight and out of Kreuzberg, in a shot that says everything about where Teufel is looking from now. Still, there's more to the story, as she knows, as we know more than a decade later, as the battles over globalization continue. The commune flat is taken over by another group of women, who perhaps will take up armor as well, roaming the streets of Kreuzberg, making them unsafe for men in gray suits. "There were seven of us," Teufel says repeatedly throughout the film. At the end, she acknowledges there are more. The hope of the movie lies in the fact that most likely there always will be.

'Gallant Girls' screens June 27, 6 p.m., Castro. See box, page 41, for venue and ticket information.

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