This corny but slickly made southern California-set drama looks plausibly like a million other period-set Bildungsromans made by the Hollywood entertainment sausage factory. It’s a story of a confused young teenager finding his calling in life with the help of a nice girl and some wise mentors, unfolding at the beginning of the 1970s, and it has all the hippy-era trimmings: love beads, barefoot extras, vintage cars with old-school California black and orange licence plates, and many needle drops from bands like Fleetwood Mac, America and even the Animals, who are singing about the House of the Rising Sun. That last one is a curious choice given it’s supposedly about a brothel of ill-repute, and this is a film about Christians, made by Christians and clearly for Christians.
Moreover, just as Eric Burdon is hitting the high notes about the ruin of many a poor boy, it becomes clear that we’re seeing one of the key characters in the story, the real-life figure of Lonnie Frisbee (played by Jonathan Roumie) as he parts ways with the others in the evangelical movement he helped start. The film suggests the rift is over Frisbee’s enthusiasm for charismatic theology and faith healing, but in actuality he was outed as gay and excommunicated from the denominations he founded because of his homosexuality.
Funnily enough, none of that is in Jesus Revolution, although that story would make for a fascinating film itself. Instead, we get a very sexless, happy clappy account of how evangelicalism collided with the hippy movement in Orange County via the encounter between Frisbee, an older Christian pastor named Chuck Smith (Kelsey Grammer), and Greg Laurie (Joel Courtney), a young congregant who years later would become a major player in the sect and a supporter of Donald Trump. The film focuses on the 1970s, when Laurie and his girlfriend Cathe (Anna Grace Barlow) are drawn to the movement as they grow disillusioned with the druggy ways of the other flower children they’ve been hanging out with. Smith’s embrace of Frisbee’s preaching style, which includes a rock band wailing about Jesus and hordes of new converts that repulse the old Christian squares at Smith’s church, is played as divine inspiration, not as the clever co-opting of youthful style by an establishment clergy at a time when the old ecclesiastical manner was very out of fashion.
In the end, if you are not a faith-oriented viewer looking to drink the film’s Kool-Aid, you might wish a different, secular film-maker was telling this story, able to examine how the Jesus movement intersected with the communal living of the time, and the rise of Christian cults that would lead to the Jonestown massacre and, in a different direction, the megachurches that now dominate Christianity around Los Angeles. In strictly formal terms, this is a well-enough-made work, but one that leaves out huge chunks of relevant detail and is essentially propaganda. It is fascinating as a text, but also richly sinister as it attempts to seduce the viewer with a narrative about redemption and love. Get thee behind me!
• Jesus Revolution is released on 23 June in UK cinemas.
