The Weather Underground explores the ’60s radical group

Most have heard of the recent case of Kathy Boudin, who served 22 years in a New York prison for her part in a 1981 bank robbery gone awry. That Boudin, who we recall was a member of the radical Weather Underground movement, generated controversy as well as headlines when news of her imminent release became public is proof that the legacy of the ’60s can still uncover a few of the more disturbing skeletons in the dysfunctional American closet.

Boudin was only a minor figure in the Underground, and her crime was a kind of sad after-shock to the rumblings and havoc that the Weathermen managed to unleash with a series of bombings and other provocative acts in the late ’60s and ’70s. Better known were the impromptu leaders of a growing radical movement crystallized by demonstrations against the war: Mark Ruud, the gifted leader of student sit-ins and other anti-Vietnam protests at Columbia University, Bernardine Dohrn, a young lawyer-turned-revolutionary, and Bill Ayers.

All three, along with other former Weatherleaders, are the subject of Sam Green and Bill Siegel’s film, “The Weather Underground,” a no-nonsense account of the movement told mostly by the major figures themselves. Green and Siegel (a Minneapolis native) have applied a lean and seamless technique to deliver the lofty goal of recalling the story of the Weatherleaders for a new generation under 40, one with wholly different views of freedom, dissent and terrorism.

We refocus, through the shared recollection of those in the movement, on an era when notions of changing the world were still as fresh as the faces in the yearbook photos. The youthful idealism made way, in part, for a quest for glamour and bravado shaped by Hollywood: “Like Bonnie and Clyde,” says Todd Gitlin, an informed critic and himself a leader of S.D.S. in the ‘60s, “they wanted action. They wanted to kick ass.”

Although the name for the organization was borrowed from a Dylan lyric, the filmmakers have thankfully chosen to skirt here a too-heavy use of the rock and roll that helped define the decade. Wiser still, they have avoided the sort of ever-present voice-over narration that burden most documentaries on public television or cable. Instead, we hear Ayers and Dohrn, married now and both university teachers, recall how their budding radicalism grew from the campus S.D.S. protests to a full-fledged militant organization seeking revolutionary change in solidarity with like-minded movements in Europe, Latin America and Southeast Asia.

In relating how their idealism, aided by the mandatory drugs and free love that seemed so much a part of the zeitgeist, led them to reject the comfort and conformity of the white suburbia that their parents had worked to provide for them in favor of the Marxist-Leninist rhetoric of revolution, each of the former Weathermen acknowledge the sheltered lives and middle-class privilege that they had taken for granted while responding to the inherent violence, greed and aggression, as witnessed in Vietnam and other cold war fronts besides, that they believed was so much a part of the American grain.

“It was something that affected us all personally,” says Ayers, speaking about the war, assuming the gray-headed perspective of wisdom and objectivity imparted after 35 years. And so, the group sought to move beyond the campuses to bring the message to “working class” youth in the urban centers of a dozen or more cities in the Summer of 1969, the year that would prove to be such a decisive one for the Underground.

Seeking to unite with the Black Panthers and other fringe elements in Chicago’s decaying inner core, they planned a massive protest action that they believed would be the start of the revolution waiting to happen. The “Days of Rage” were meant to strike the white power structure where it lived and, by smashing the shops and confronting the police into a battle in the streets, Weatherleaders hoped it would burn beyond the borders of Lincoln Park. “When you feel you have the moral high ground,” says Brian Flanagan, a former Weatherman who now owns a New York bar, “you’re capable of some pretty horrendous things.”

Why the “Rage” riots didn’t coalesce into anything more than broken glass and a few broken heads of the 200 or so that showed up seems of less importance to Ayers, who wistfully retraces his steps in the mayhem for the camera, baseball bat in hand. The failure of “Days of Rage,” as well as the infamous incident when a mishandled bomb resulted in three deaths and the destruction of a Manhattan townhouse hideout, led the Weathermen to step up a campaign of bombings and robberies while also renouncing, to their credit, the taking of lives as a legitimate means in the struggle.

The filmmakers make subtle but effective use of stylistic flourishes, including depth of field shots and fast action camera, to suggest the alienation that those who remained—their numbers were waning—must have felt as the ’70s wore on, as their attacks became more and more the stuff of ridicule by the Left as well as the establishment, and the cause was diluted by Feminism and other social movements. “It was like a Christian crusade gone mad,” says Gitlin, barely containing a sense of betrayal of the Left.

Ultimately, the Weather Underground’s radicalism did not change the world, but rather saw the world change in spite of it. Most avoided arrest, serious prosecution and even managed to expose Cointelpro, illegal FBI methods of counterinsurgency, in exchange for lives spent on the run. The hard question of the lessons learned is left for them, and us, still to ponder.