Jesus Revolution
(PG-13) ★★★★ A staid pastor teams up with a hippie street preacher.
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, “counterculture and Christ had a groovy thing going on,” said Dennis Harvey in Variety. This “imperfect but warmly engaging” drama revisits the moment when West Coast hippies turned to Christianity, launching the so-called Jesus movement. Kelsey Grammer portrays evangelical pastor Chuck Smith, who revived his dwindling Calvary Chapel congregation by opening the church to some tie-dyed young nonconformists and their poncho-clad leader. Jonathan Roumie, who’s known for playing Jesus on TV’s The Chosen, proves to be “persuasively magnetic” as the hippie preacher Lonnie Frisbee. And though the film pushes Frisbee aside too soon, “it’s one of the most appealing faith-based big-screen entertainments in a while.” It’s more an example of “preaching to the converts,” said Nell Minow in RogerEbert.com. The “gently told” narrative avoids hard questions, tiptoeing around Frisbee’s homosexuality, substance abuse, and other inconvenient details from his sad true story, which was chronicled well in a 2005 documentary. Jesus Revolution is “capably made but superficial”— an attempt to proselytize rather than examine the challenges such movements and converts inevitably confront. But judged against other faith-based films, this modestly popular release “passes muster in a lot of regards,” said Roger Moore in Movie Nation. Even when the idealized story turns its focus away from Smith and Frisbee to follow its narrator’s own conversion journey, the movie “works in that classic upbeat California vibe way.” While religious films can be divisive when the faithful are presented as battling outsiders, “there is no harm in corny.” (In theaters only)