Grown into middle age and beyond, radical revolutionaries lose their romantic glamour, their appeal, and their ideals. Now computer consultants, floor refinishers, parents and housewives, even prisoners of the State of California, they say “I’m sorry” and are bemused or confused about youthful goals and philosophies: “we were all young, we were all fooled.” In America they were often the cream of the crop, privileged high achievers, college kids, brainy national science scholarship finalists; as fabulously wealthy Patricia Campbell Hearst smiles and says on Sarah Ferguson’s show, “my childhood was great. Really. I think it was pretty perfect.”

Oscar-nominated documentarian -- his sole fiction feature was a polemical fake documentary for ZDF German Television -- director/producer Robert Stone’s Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst is a sobering account of a chaotic two-year period, when the generation of the Vietnam ‘60s was lapsing into “a blur of disco and cocaine.” Believing that no real change had been effected and that the military-corporate Right continued to reign, others, however, sought to pick up the torch.

Three-and-a-half years in the making, this new film is careful not to take sides, though it can hardly fail to comment merely by including chilling minutes of “the first worldwide coverage of an unplanned event,” the LAPD’s Waco-Davidian overkill at “the nesting place of the Symbionese Liberation Army.” Nearby, at a Disneyland motel, Hearst and Bill and Emily Harris watched on live television, while San Quentin inmates Russ Little and Joe Remiro -- whose freedom had been the reason for the newspaper heiress’ kidnapping -- received oral reports, and the coroner subsequently reported five bodies though there were actually six.

No one, in hard fact, comes off smelling like roses. The FBI is so incompetent it does not know the fugitives had already fled the Bay Area from under its very nose. The latter had no floor plan as such, “to take the South in ’75, the Midwest in ’76,” no organized ideology against “the Fascist Insect,” turned off some of its members and supporters, and essentially was no more than a tiny group brought together by chance and which disintegrated into the bathos of filching sweatsocks from Mel’s Sporting Goods; their one seemingly thought-out “assassination” was bungled and probably got the wrong man in Marcus Foster, Reagan California’s first African-American school superintendent, while their two bank robberies left one innocent customer dead and two others wounded.

Understandably stressed, Hearst’s father and mother do not impress, though it is no fault of theirs that the SLA’s demanded three-hundred-million-dollar food distribution to the needy leads to chaos, violence, confrontation and recrimination. Patty Hearst, become Tania the SLA soldier, not interviewed here because she has already told her story in books, films and TV interviews, calls up ambiguous reactions at best: terrified captive turned militant in voiced tapes, later “rescued” and repentant (or forgetful), sentenced to seven years for bank robbery but released after twenty-two months and subsequently pardoned by President Carter.

Title-identified only on first appearance, many also trailing a nom de guerre, the interviewees become confusing, though that hardly matters. Styling themselves patriots, not radicals, the group loosely formed around Berkeley, to rekindle dying anti-Vietnam War momentum, this time focusing on rights for black “political” prisoners, beginning with escapee Donald DeFreeze (“Cinque”). Unexpectedly thrust into the spotlight with the kidnapping, through astute audacity and dumb luck they became the cynosure of our first -- and certainly not last -- mass media frenzy. Manipulating those covering the events from “Press City/pop. 85½,” they undermined their own real grievances through irrelevant hysterical rhetoric and senseless bloodletting, shoring up Stone’s thesis that “terrorism is a ridiculous failure at everything except getting attention.” Their story, he says, is tragic and yet “humorous,” their outsized heroic self-image paralleled by references to, and clips from, Zorro, The Swamp Fox, Robin Hood (mainly Errol Flynn, but also Disney’s cartoon), State of Siege, Che, Bonnie and Clyde and Peter Pan.

The general news footage included is a real coup, as much an end as a means here, for local stations routinely disposed of earlier film records during the mid-70s switch to video. By great good luck, the director came across thousands of cans of 16 mm station outtakes that a former activist had secretly stored rather than destroy as his station instructed. Combined with first-time interviews with Little -- acquitted now, married and living under an alias in Hawaii -- and Mike Bortin -- since sentenced to eight years for the 1975 bank killing -- such footage paints a vivid picture of the birth of radical rhetoric, celebrity terrorism, of resistance, rebellion and death.

(Released by Magnolia Pictures; not rated by MPAA.)