Bernal heights
The Motorcycle Diaries travels upward and onward.

By Dennis Harvey

THE ROAD MOVIE may have been officially invented in 1969, when Easy Rider's Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper discovered America – the murrican version – in a semirebellious, glamorous fashion that appealed very much to young audiences looking for an elusive something-more the movie craftily kept elusive. Myriad studio-distributed stories of counterculture seekers followed in Easy Rider's tracks, and nearly all of them pointed toward the same vague disillusionment that led Fonda's Captain America (ouch) to announce, "We blew it" just before getting blown away by rednecks.

Early-'70s road-movie politics were often radical in a manner you can't imagine being issued forth from AOL Time Warner today. And yet what dates worst about these films is their requisite doomed outlook regarding societal progress; they're marked by too frequent suggestions that the nouveau angry young man (usually surrounded by merely distracting "chicks") is just pissing against the wind. Curiously, getting all bummed out and defeatist about the establishment was a fashionable must. In retrospect, perhaps those early-'70s filmmakers should've checked themselves and realized the revolution will not be sulky.

Walter Salles's The Motorcycle Diaries feels very much like a throwback to that era, but with an important improvement: its road-tripping protagonists get enlightened upward, gaining strength, purpose, and profundity from confronting injustice. Needless to say, this is the type of experience we're in rather desperate need of at present. Salles's exercise in feel-good historical romanticism isn't a great movie, but it's an enjoyable one – and inspirational for reasons way, way out of marketplace fashion.

The romanticism tag definitely applies, since The Motorcycle Diaries cannily exploits Che Guevara as icon by finding a quite legitimate context in which to ignore all the problematic aspects of his later life. Of course, it's naive to believe history's great freedom fighters must be any less contrary and fallible than their opposite numbers – world-class ideologues both good and evil require fanaticism. We should critique Che because he admired Stalin, ordered summary executions for indefensible reasons, and became a blindsided ideologue. But we shouldn't dismiss his brilliant and dedicated participation in genuine liberation struggles. The cold war mentality that views Communists as robo-antihumanists and those working under the banner of democracy as, well, heroes is ludicrous – especially in a "democratic" global climate governed by corporations.

Such is the enormous present-time subtext bracketing this film's willfully small (in tone, if not scale) flashback. Early 1952 sees a 23-year-old, comfortably middle-class-born Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (Gael García Bernal) dropping out of a Buenos Aires med school one semester short of graduation to travel the South American continent with 29-year-old "fatty" Alberto Granada (Rodrigo de la Serna – no relation to the above) on a 1939 Norton 500 hog dubbed "the Mighty One."

The latter putzes out very quickly, but its two riders persevere, moving from Argentina to Chile to Peru to Brazil as hitchhikers, food- and bed-moochers, and borderline con men (due to frequent exaggerations about medical skills). Their ultimate destination is a leper colony where both volunteer. The resulting route charts a learning curve. Beginning with a visit to the extravagant Euro enclave inhabited by Ernesto's rich but distracted fiancée (Mía Maestro), the pair move on to an educative swan dive through the realpolitik likes of political asylum, labor abuse, limited church charity, and pervasive "peasant" hardship.

The Motorcycle Diaries has plenty of dents. Eric Gautier's location landscape photography is nice enough, but the story line's poetic mythologizing cries out for a full-on wide-screen lyricism it never quite attains. For too long, Rodrigo de la Serna – who looks 29-going-45, though in IMDb truth he's only nudging the former – offers just the kind of randy, coarse Latino Americano comedy relief that audiences could use some relief from experiencing. Gustavo Santaolalla's score is a blandly Latin-ized indie rock equivalent to Paul Westerberg's music for Singles. And the action sequence in which asthmatic Ernesto swims across a river to join his leper comrades makes for a forced climax.

But these are fairly minor quibbles given the film's appealing assurance, which remains faithful to the pleasures, pains, and insights the protaganists derive from their journey. It takes a lot of skill to bring off something so deceptively simple. Salles demonstrates an appealing selflessness here that counters his prior art-house hits Behind the Sun and Central Station – movies whose bleeding-heart poetry looked awfully ready for its Oscar moments. The Motorcycle Diaries is casual in comparison, thanks in large part to José Rivera's extraordinary, minimalist screenplay. (No movie has ever omitted a "Dear John" letter's contents so profitably.)

At heart, this multinationally financed, Robert Redford-produced enterprise is about the radicalization of individual thought. Which it enthusiastically supports. It's not quite Che: The Movie of the T-Shirt. Instead, it provides some valid reasons to wear that iconic red and black.

'The Motorcycle Diaries' opens Fri/1, Clay Theatre, 2261 Fillmore, S.F., (415) 267-4893; Albany Twin, 1115 Solano, Albany, (510) 464-5980; and Piedmont Theatre, 4186 Piedmont, Oakl., (510) 464-5980. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.