REBELS WITH A CAUSE is a meat-and-potatoes film about Students for a Democratic Society, a much-maligned and much-romanticized nationwide student activist network of the 1960s. Garvy, herself an SDS member, contacted several of the former campus activists from across the nation to compile her history of the organization.

REBELS is your standard talking heads documentary with occasional period pictures and film footage thrown in (and lots and lots of earnest ’60s music—even “We Shall Overcome” gets some play here). Garvy herself appears in the film, setting up the story and summarizing events, as well as providing ample voiceover throughout.

As I looked over my notes, I found that I had been very busy indeed during REBELS WITH A CAUSE. In fact, I can’t think when I’ve taken so many notes since, well, since university. Therein lies the issue: The movie is so excessively PBS-like in its presentation, so aggressively education-TV, that I felt like I had to absorb this firehose of historical information for the quiz later. I can’t even call this a loving look back, because Garvy has taken more of a historian’s flat approach than a filmmaker’s personal approach. Given access to these persons, I could have made the identical film.

Don’t get me wrong. I think viewers are the better for learning about young, mostly white kids’ heightened awareness of their lives of unshared privilege, and for hearing the SDS members’ recollections (and a few of their reflections on present times). It’s just such a green-vegetable of a film to sit through that folks who don’t have the added enticement of actually knowing an interviewee may feel like they’re back in the lecture hall.

Stretching from its big-bang origins in 1962 to its whimpering finale in the early 1970s, REBEL WITH A CAUSE is a serviceable basic history of the SDS, and I recommend it highly for classrooms or viewers who were in college in the ’60s. Folks simply looking to spend their limited entertainment dollars might do well to give this one a miss.

—Roxanne Bogucka, an Action Girl!

hybridCinema Ratings Guide:

Take a pal and pay full price for both tickets.

It’s worth a full-price ticket.

It’s worth a matinee ticket.

Wait for video rental.

Check out the video from the library, if you must.

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