WALK INTO ANY of the films playing as part of J. Hoberman's "American Outlaws: Scenes from the Dream Life" series at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive and be prepared to face still-extant relics from the '60s head on: a placard designating the People's Park, a giant Jimi mural, the stale smell of smoked grass, etc. A bit bloated and sodden as far as national myths go, the '60s are omnipresent on the blocks of Telegraph Avenue leading up to the UC Berkeley campus. And yet, while counterculture icons abound, how many of us actually remember how it all went down from the JFK era to Nixon? In his book The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties (the genesis of the PFA series) Hoberman's project is one of contextualization. Deftly maneuvering landmarks both political and cinematic, the Village Voice film critic painstakingly unravels a notoriously knotted era, examining the thorny negotiation process that has cast such a long shadow on American culture.

Hoberman's brief series at the PFA shies away from the Vietnam generation's most oversaturated films in the interest of privileging context over cults of personality that develop around icons like Easy Rider. Indeed, Hoberman is concerned here with the films that didn't live on – those that didn't survive the '60s for a healthy shelf life in Blockbusters the nation over. Hence selections like Wild in the Streets and Joe: brash, unabsorbed relics where cultural crisis shapes fantasies of hippie power and conservative backlash. While a holdover like Bonnie and Clyde can be considered in terms of its aesthetic technique or dramatic performances, a dated freak-out like Bloody Mama – tagline: "The Family That Slays Together Stays Together" – comes off wholly as a piece performed in the year 1969. The film, directed by shoestring king Roger Corman, depicts dysfunction on a spectacular scale. Described by Hoberman as the "degenerate child of Bonnie and Clyde," Bloody Mama confronts America from inside the nuclear family; the film concerns a murderous, druggy clan headed by a gleefully outrageous, worshipped matriarch played by Shelley Winters. If that sounds far-out, well, that's Hoberman's point.

Using narrative analysis as his central point of inquiry, Hoberman demonstrates the decade's sea change in a snappy series of character permutations: the Hollywood Freedom Fighter gives way to the Secret Agent of History, who becomes the Righteous Outlaw, who morphs into the Legal Vigilante before settling as the '60s Survivor. These categories are fluid and flexible, with manifestations both from the left and right sprinkling film history – for example, Hoberman sees John Wayne's hero in The Alamo and Kirk Douglas's Spartacus as political mirrors of the same Hollywood Freedom Fighter mold. In themselves, these characterizations do a lot to emphasize just how culturally loaded such archetypes were, but it's in tracing the transitions from type to type that Hoberman really comes to life, evoking a wrenching account of a shifting national consciousness. Contemporary college students may recognize Captain America as a hippie idol and Dirty Harry as a reactionary action hero, but Hoberman connects the dots, and, in doing so, explicates how these ideas came into being.

Because in that era politics and performance became increasingly interchangeable (perhaps the '60s generation's defining contribution to the modern world), it's necessary to ground all this movie mythmaking in its political counterpart, and Hoberman does so with tenacity. He's expert at emphasizing the Vietnam era's light-speed synchronicity; he does so beautifully by showing, for example, that the last two months of 1969 had Nixon lashing out, My Lai uncovered, Altamont unleashed, Manson discovered, and Night of the Living Dead favorably reviewed in the Village Voice. Given the context, how could one not see Romero's low-budget dystopic vision as "the most literal possible image of America devouring itself?"

Hoberman's scope is, to be sure, ambitious, and there are points when it's difficult to keep score of all that his argument encompasses. Still, The Dream Life works brilliantly in small chunks, and it can be quite thrilling to contemplate the threads: to trace the development of the "pseudo-event" from JFK and The Manchurian Candidate to Chicago '68 and Wild in the Streets to Nixon's '72 campaign and The Candidate; to connect the "sickness" at the heart of Shock Corridor, Catch-22, and Lenny Bruce's comedy; to see how James Bond's pleasure in violence anticipates the culminating massacre of The Wild Bunch. When this showman's eye for narrative combines with crackling prose (a favorite: "Eastwood trumped Elvis in proposing a new synthesis between hipster and enforcer"), Hoberman reveals himself a critic to be reckoned with.

While The Dream Life is an invaluable document in and of itself, it seems doubly impressive coming from the Village Voice's main film critic. Besides being unbelievably productive, Hoberman is impressively versatile; he may not possess the polemical flare of a Pauline Kael or the philosophical elegance of an André Bazin, but rarely has a film critic seemed so comfortable considering the medium from so many angles. As Hoberman's readers know from his work on experimentalist Jack Smith or reviews of films like Au Hasard Balthazar, he isn't shy about giving himself over to aesthetic analysis of the films he loves, but he's also capable of considering movies as cultural phenomenon. In The Dream Life the proof is in the pudding. The fact that he can, and is willing to, go both ways strikes me as a great strength and makes Hoberman an important mediating presence in the often divisive annals of film criticism.

'American Outlaws: Scenes from the Dream Life, 1968-72' runs through June 18, PFA Theater, 2575 Bancroft, Berk. $4-$8. (510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/index.html. See Rep Clock for show times.