A film directed by Milos Forman; written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski; produced by Oliver Stone, Janet Yang, and Michael Hausman; and released by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 129 minutes; not rated. Cast includes Woody Harrelson (Larry Flynt), Courtney Love (Althea Leasure Flynt), Edward Norton (Alan Isaacman), Donna Hanover (Ruth Carter Stapleton), Brett Harrelson (Jimmy Flynt), Richard Paul (The Rev. Jerry Falwell), James Cromwell (Charles Keating), James Carville (Simon Leis), and Larry Flynt (Judge Morrissey).

The published shooting script of The People vs. Larry Flynt (by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski; New Market Press) contains, among many scenes squeezed out of the film, a discussion by Larry Flynt, founder of the illustrated monthly Hustler, with his staff after he weathers a prosecution for publishing pornography. "What this trial made me realize," says Flynt, "is that everything is political." One of his associates blurts: "Jeez, Larry, you're a regular Thomas Paine." Flynt responds: "Who?"

 The exchange is worth rescuing because it all but capsulizes this extraordinary film. Even when the purveyor has in mind nothing more elevated than making money, pornography inevitably becomes politicized, in our time even as before the French Revolution, when Marie Antoinette was so lewdly portrayed. And however ignorant at the start, the smut merchant learns to fight with the political tools available. In essence, this film is the story of how Larry Flynt came to know and love the First Amendment. The climax of the romance is his victory in the Supreme Court of the United States over Jerry Falwell, whom his magazine had portrayed, in coarse jest, as having had intercourse with his mother in an outhouse.

 Although the film contains a substantial amount of Hustler atmospherics and degradation, the tone is hardly prurient. Rather than glamorizing Flynt, it shows the personal price that he paid for ignorance, noncomformity, and audacity - the loss of a wife (brilliantly played by Courtney Love) to AIDS, life in a wheelchair and years lost to drugs after he was cut down by a celebrity-stalker of the type that our century knows all too well, and incarceration for playing the fool in court. Woody Harrelson plays the formidably ill-behaved Flynt with, if not innocence, at least a winning lack of malice. Flynt himself makes an appearance as an inflexible judge.

 This may not be the traditional classroom film on free speech, but it offers a very traditional point - that a free society, to be truly free, ought to protect the speech it hates. It all seems so clear. But it is also clear that there remain many who regard this particular form of free speech - the Hustler kind - as too dangerous to tolerate. It is worth remembering that even after the supposedly definitive victory over Falwell, the Mapplethorpe wars still lay ahead.

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