If you care about making a difference in our country then you should know, at the very least, some of the history of the protest movement which will always included what occurred at the and the tiral that followed.

“Chicago 10” is the recently released film about that trial which proved to be one of the pivotal events of the 1960s an the generation that defined it.

The “10” refers to the original “7” with the addition of three other key players. The group consisted of: Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John Froines, Lee Weiner, Bobby Seale, and lawyers William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass.

The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago — to say nothing of the violent confrontations between police and antiwar protesters that simultaneously seethed in the city’s parks and streets — can hardly be called an obscure historical event. Demonstrators chanted, “The whole world is watching,” and so it was. Images of blue-helmeted officers and their long-haired antagonists have been part of the collective memory ever since.

Some of the best accounts of what happened, what it felt like and what it all seemed to mean, were produced while the smell of tear gas still hung over Michigan Avenue. The nostalgic or the curious can seek out Norman Mailer’s “Miami and the Siege of Chicago,” for example, which analyzed events inside and beyond the convention hall with its author’s characteristic, and in this case perfectly appropriate, blend of intellectual grandiosity and journalistic acumen.

“Chicago 10,” Brett Morgen’s semi-animated, semi-documentary attempt to make the ’60s cool for a new generation of kids, does the opposite. It is a narrow, glib dollop of canned history, an affirmation of received thinking rather than a challenge to it. Squandering 40 years of hindsight, Mr. Morgen is content to trot out the tired mythology of the era one more time. His mélange of styles and techniques shows visual ingenuity, but not much in the way of historical insight. He takes the intricate, frequently self-contradictory theater of the New Left at face value, and panders to the credulity of the audience by breathing new life into old clichés. Groovy! Power to the people!

CHICAGO 10 – TRAILER

The addition of anachronistic music selections, including tunes by Eminem and the Beastie Boys, seems like a bid for contemporary relevance, as does the use of animated renderings of the conspiracy trial, complete with voice-overs by famous actors. The script, adapted from official transcripts of the conspiracy trial, is full of found absurdity and unlikely profundity. It is fun to hear Hank Azaria doing Abbie Hoffman,Nick Nolte growling as the lead prosecutor, and Roy Scheider, in one of his last film roles, impersonating Judge Julius Hoffman, no relative of Abbie’s.

The animation itself has a slapdash, lurching feel. More powerful are the documentary segments interwoven with the recreated trial, which bring back not only Mr. Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and the other media stars of antiwar militancy, but also their principal antagonist, Mayor Richard J. Daley, with his flat Midwestern vowels and epic jowls.

Watching “Chicago 10,” you can catch a soupçon of the era’s dominant moods: there is the rage both of inflamed youth and of the affronted forces of law and tradition; there is the heady mixture of political grievance and newfound freedom; and there is panic and exhilaration, once things start getting ugly.

“It’s total theater; everyone’s an actor,” Abbie Hoffman observes. Mr. Morgen certainly grasps this aspect of both the demonstrations and the trial that followed, and he captures the cross-pollination of political activism and celebrity culture that made stars out of Mr. Rubin, Mr. Hoffman and their co-defendant, the Black Panther leader Bobby Seale (voiced by Jeffrey Wright). (At the time, they were known as the Chicago Eight. Mr. Morgen adds their lawyers, William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass, to arrive at the title of the film.)

The problem is that “Chicago 10” seems wholly unwilling to examine the limits of its view of history, or indeed to engage any sense of history beyond the superficialities of rhetoric and image. Here’s a small quiz: Who did the Democrats nominate in 1968? What candidates opposed him? Which Republican did he face in the general election? Who won? Anyone who doesn’t know the answers will not learn them from “Chicago 10,” a movie about 1968 in which Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon and Robert F. Kennedy are never mentioned, and Eugene McCarthy’s name is heard only in passing.

Nor is there any inkling of the reverberations of the convention riots or the conspiracy trial beyond the self-aggrandizing precincts of the protest movement. The prestige of the Yippies may have grown, but it is far from clear that their cause benefited. Nixon won his narrow victory partly because the electorate was unnerved by the specter of chaos in the streets, and also because many on the left abandoned Humphrey. The joyous, prankish spirit evident among the protesters turned sour and nihilistic; the “festival of life” envisioned in 1968 gave way, a year later, to Days of Rage.

It was a complicated time, and the arguments about it are far from over. “Chicago 10” will not be much use in any of them. If you really want to know what the ’60s were about, you’ll do better to look elsewhere.

CHICAGO 10.

Written and directed by Brett Morgen; produced by Mr. Morgen and Graydon Carter;

WITH THE VOICES OF: Hank Azaria (Abbie Hoffman), Mark Ruffalo (Jerry Rubin), Jeffrey Wright (Bobby Seale),Dylan Baker (David Dellinger),  Liev Schreiber(William Kunstler), Nick Nolte (Thomas Foran), and Roy Scheider (Judge Julius Hoffman).

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