1968. Paris. The student revolutions. The year the government cut off funding for the Cinematheque Francaise, and Henri Langlois got the boot. The year after Godard opened Weekend, announcing "the end of cinema." The height of the Vietnam war. The summer that all the baby boomers talk about. The summer of the Paris general strike.

The Dreamers evokes the memory of that time -- not a time I lived through, but one we all know about. It's the reason that people of a certain generation tell you college will be all sexual experimentation and philosophical argument and mind-blowing discoveries of cultural classics. Once upon a star, people really did sit in coffee shops all day smoking cigarettes and sifting through poetry, sincerely planning to change the world, talking about Josef von Sternberg and Howard Hawks and Nicholas Ray, figuring out how to reinvent rock n roll, and doing it with some semblance of originality.

It's a movie about a young American, polite, fresh-faced, played by the ever so cute Michael Pitt. He's studying in France for a year, he's absorbing the beauty of the capital city, and he is in love with the movies. When he goes to the Cinematheque, he joins the other loner obsessives in the front few rows; they want the images to reach them first, before they drift too far through the air. They gaze up and revise for lifetimes of vivid dreams -- they watch Bande a Part and Shock Corridor and King Kong, and their eyes glaze over in wonder.

Cinematheque is shut down. Protests from the fans. Out on the barricades, Pitt hooks up with a couple of new friends --  a brother and sister team who pose like the sexiest people ever, who look like they've seen and done it all. Their names are Theo and Isabelle, they are played by Louis Garrel and Eva Green, and they take their new pal back to the house. It's not a mansion, but it's a big enough place, they have their own section, and their parents are away.

So it begins: A month-long odyssey of sitting around, eating, drinking, playing mind games on each other, discovering the lift of marijuana and running through the city in joy. The dreamers talk about movies, quote lines at each other, play their favourite soundtracks and pose like their silver screen idols -- as they do, the great cinema images of old are intercut with the movie's own action.

There is also sex. And the fallout from the tensions around that sexual discovery, as Pitt begins to wonder whether Garrel and Green are too wrapped up in their own little bubble to ever discover the outside world. Which leads to Pitt questioning Garrel's bookish love for Marxism, and confronting him with something basic that he doesn't want to hear: "I think if you truly believed what you're saying, you'd be out there."

The Dreamers manages to criticise the hypocrisy and forced radicalism of its characters while enjoying their company and loving the textures that surround them; the camera flows, the frames beam with colour, there are the film clips, and we get bursts of Hendrix and Clapton licks on the soundtrack. It can do this because it's seen through the eyes of the Pitt character -- more grounded, and more of an observer, than his French friends, who are the best of romantics and the least likely people to ever grow up. And because the film has been directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, who like no other filmmaker can mix up romance and disgust.

Think of Before the Revolution, with that hypnotically energetic camerawork capturing a bunch of uselessly ponderous, self-hating intellectuals. Of Last Tango in Paris, where the mood was a constant uneasy drift between the release of escaping from the real world's commitments and the anguish that inspired the escape. Or The Last Emperor, one of the most visually splendid films ever made, and a story of monarchy made by an anti-monarchist. The counterculture of the late 60s is one of the most fascinating things from 20th Century history, and the arguments will never be settled about how many kids really did seize the man by the neck and how many sat playing rebels at the weekend. Reading about it is interesting enough; through the vibrancy of a film like The Dreamers, it's thrilling.

(Released by Fox Searchlight Pictures and rated "NC-17" for explicit sexual content.)

Review also posted on www.ukcritic.com.