120 min | PG-13 | February 24, 2023 | Lionsgate
Southern California, 1968. A burnt-out Calvary Chapel pastor opens his doors to barefoot hippies, a charismatic street preacher baptizes them by the hundreds in the Pacific, and a lost teenager finds Jesus instead of acid. The story is a genuine American earthquake. The movie treats it like a greeting card.
“Jesus Revolution” dramatizes the late-1960s spiritual awakening that swept disaffected California youth into evangelical Christianity. Chuck Smith pastors a shrinking, aging congregation in Costa Mesa. Lonnie Frisbee arrives barefoot and bearded, a self-styled hippie evangelist who speaks the counterculture’s language. Greg Laurie is the teenager caught between drugs and meaning. The film wants to be about a collision between the establishment church and the hippies it fears, and the real subject is whether an institution can survive letting in the people it was built to keep out.
Kelsey Grammer plays Chuck Smith as a stiff man slowly thawing, and the performance works best in the small moments of discomfort when he washes the feet of strangers he does not understand. Jonathan Roumie plays Lonnie Frisbee with a magnetic looseness that curdles into ego, and he gives the film its only character with genuine contradiction. Joel Courtney plays Greg Laurie as earnest and searching, but the script keeps him at the surface of his own crisis. Anna Grace Barlow plays Cathe Martin as the bright girl pulling Greg toward something better. The actors commit, but the screenplay hands them resolutions before it earns the conflicts.
Jon Erwin and Brent McCorkle direct from a script by Erwin and Jon Gunn, and they shoot the era in warm, golden, sun-flared light that flattens everything into nostalgia. The camera loves the baptisms on the beach, the crowds wading into the surf, the hands raised against the sky. The editing rushes every turning point. A drug trip, a conversion, a marriage, and a schism all get the same compressed montage treatment, so the moments that should land hardest pass in seconds. The production design nails the period, but the filmmaking smooths the rough texture out of a movement that was anything but smooth.
The Jesus Movement was strange, volatile, and full of people whose faith and damage were tangled together. Frisbee himself is a tragic figure the film glances at and then sets aside. “Jesus Revolution” sands that complexity into an uplift machine that asks nothing difficult of its audience. The remarkable history is all here. The movie about it is not.