One of the most vivid memories of my ongoing film education was when, as a college freshman, I first heard about the February 1968 protest by students and artists to protect Henri Langlois’s direction of the Paris Cinémathèque—the very event which opens The Dreamers. My wonderful professor Charles Derry read an account of the demonstration from Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana’s Truffaut biography, and the scenes it conjured were ready-made to fit my punk-cinephile fantasies of artistic disobedience: a flurry of unified protest telegrams from figures as diverse as Nagisa Oshima, Robert Bresson, and Jerry Lewis, the image of Godard squirming through police cordons, rallying the crowd in an image fit for a hipster Delacroix. It was enough to put tears in my eyes. On the French political landscape all of this might have been only a warning tremor predicting the epic turbulence to come, but to me it seemed indescribably beautiful, a perfect moment where life and cinema, behind-and-in-front of the camera, achieved stirring synergy. And as list-making and pantheon-building are such an integral part of a young man’s compulsions, the synchronized rally of so many enshrined names, most known then only by reputation, was for me like Marvel Comic’s “Secret Wars” and forty years of Major League All-Star games all rolled into one.

Since those days I’ve grudgingly abandoned most of my florid illusions about any correspondence between movie romance and movie-going reality. In New York City I learned that the repertory houses weren’t populated by sad-eyed, sylph-like, passionate young beauties, but by bored retirees who raise holy hell in the bathrooms post-screening as they relieve themselves through inflamed prostates. Young people, if any of them seriously give a shit about movies, seem mostly content to stay in with their Criterion DVDs. And I’ve never yet gotten laid because of my cinema habits, only in spite of them.But the first ten minutes of The Dreamers brought a deluge of old delusions rushing back; Bertolucci’s endearingly loony “Paris in ‘68” triptych revolves around a world—it’s hard for me to imagine that it really existed—where the movies are a verifiable youth culture. Dawson’s Creek-er Mike Pitt is Matthew, an American student studying French abroad (judging from his accent, quite unsuccessfully), who’s inducted into the “freemasonry of cinephiles” through afternoons at the Cinémathèque, where he meets the two-person cliqué of siblings Isabelle and Theo (Eva Green and Louis Garrel, son of Phillipe). It’s obvious that movies don’t stay obediently in the theater for these kids; “I entered this world on the Champs Elysées in 1959” says Isabelle, and her words are accompanied by one of the movie’s often-obvious intercuts, here Jean Seberg hawking New York Herald-Tribunes in Breathless. Our principles aren’t just watching these great Sixties movies but using them as new templates for living. I’m afraid what follows, essentially an incest-tinged fuckfest in the twin’s posh flat, might be a consummately bad work of art, though being secure in that knowledge would in no way dampen my enthusiasm for it. It’s certainly a shallow enough movie; none of the three young leads, pretty though they are, seem capable of occupying the script—they can only just drift across the surface of it. And the ideas that float along with them are callow enough: the trio’s pompous chats tend to revolve around those training-wheels profundities which neophyte film buffs always find such delectation in: the filmmaker as peeping tom, Godard’s loud hyperbole on Nicholas Ray as the embodiment of cinema, etc. But it’s a real mistake to confuse the intellectual limitations of these kids with those of Bertolucci; in fact I think the director’s smart enough to let his script play dumb, to ignore the attrition of a lifetime at the movies, and to enter the threesome’s stoned, meandering debates without condescension, though one gets the distinct impression that Pitt, weighing the merits of Chaplin and Keaton, has probably never seen a movie by either.

A lot of The Dreamers’ detractors were incensed that Bertolucci, making a movie about the insurgent past from the vantage point of the troubled present, would choose to spend all of his time locked inside with a bunch of kids rutting away at each other and clumsily test-driving attitudes from books they just put down and movies they saw last week. Calling a movie teen-aged or adolescent, as The Dreamers rightly could be, is so often used as a pejorative brush-off, but it’s a brush-off that presumes to negate an entire era of the human experience—a dumb, terrible, and beautiful era. It’s an overheated time that’s easy to talk down to as the sibling’s patriarch—a poet, like Bertolucci’s own father—does, suggesting that amidst the maelstrom of student unrest “a little lucidity would not go amiss.”

But Bertolucci was the cinema’s ultimate wunderkind, a published poet by 19 and shortly thereafter making movies, really exiting movies that were by no means lucid; he knows firsthand the vital creative power of youth to transform, and he proves himself eternally and affectionately fascinated by the revolutionary nature of adolescence. Only this time of life, with its dearth of real experience and its excess of real passion, can vividly conceptualize revolution, or be so naïve as to imagine that it’s doing something that has never been done before. The Nouvelle Vague that’s so important to The Dreamers, that storied, refuted, lionized movement, is above all a brat’s uprising, a children’s crusade, with all the bravery and reckless romantic piffle implicit in such terms. It may be the product of a thirtysomething director working from an eightysomething’s memoir, but who can ever again feel Jules et Jim as they did at seventeen? And if The Dreamers just boils down to a debauched-chic ‘68 primer for the WB set, I can think of worse crimes than providing the kids cool enough to buy PG-13 tickets and theater-hop with the idealized model of a generation that dressed better, fucked freer, and spray painted cool, cryptic slogans like “under the pavement, the beach.” I mean, did you see all those drum circles and dreadlocks at the RNC? And the ‘Bush’ spelled with a swastika graffiti?

Somebody’s got to give these kids some pointers, and I sincerely hope what Bogart was to Godard, what Breathless was to Bertolucci, The Dreamers will be for at least a handful of High School weirdoes. Bertolucci remains the champion of youth in art, and if his more recent endorsements—among them Harmony Korine and the sub-competent photographer Huger Foote—have been lacking in discretion, I can at least agree with the spirit in which they were given. Maybe the artist himself really has gone to seed; the friend with whom I re-watched The Dreamers probably wasn’t too off-target in calling the movie “film buff porn.” But I’m willing to forgive a lot of intellectual shortcomings when a film, in a year that was a drought for real images, provides me something as lovely as the moment when a candle’s flame ripples across Isabelle’s hair as she leans into Matthew for a kiss, and then the unflappable way that she smoothes the fire away. And I can overlook a lot of puerile psychodrama for the shock of Matthew and Isabelle’s first post-coital kiss, where they paint their faces with blood from her just-ruptured hymen; in a movie world that’s inclined to sanitize sex into abstraction, such sheer, ecstatic raunch is invigorating. And if I sometimes love The Dreamers, it’s above all for the way that it inhabits a time when everything was too new to properly criticize, when movies seemed scaled exactly to life, and when my favorite people and I had the guts to talk about the strange, new, highly-evolved individuals that we might someday become. What’s all that junk if not the quintessence of revolution?

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