A few brief thoughts about Jesus Revolution
A safe, crowd-pleasing film that ignores and obscures the messiness of the Christian hippie movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
I’ve got a lot of thoughts about Jesus Revolution, the new movie about the rise of the Christian hippie movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and I wouldn’t really know where to start if this was a formal review. So I’m just going to write my thoughts down in point form instead.
The most historically significant characters in this movie—and the ones played by the best-known actors—are Chuck Smith (Frasier’s Kelsey Grammer), a middle-aged pastor looking to liven up his Southern California church, and Lonnie Frisbee (The Chosen’s Jonathan Roumie), a hippie who helps Smith connect to the teenaged and twentysomething Baby Boomers who have tried sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll but are still looking for something that can give their lives meaning. The central character in this movie, however, is Greg Laurie (The Kissing Booth’s Joel Courtney), a teenager who gets caught up in the Jesus movement and eventually becomes a preacher in his own right.
The film is co-directed by Jon Erwin and Brent McCorkle. Erwin’s past films—which he directed with his brother Andrew—include I Can Only Imagine, I Still Believe, and American Underdog, and increasingly they have begun to remind me of the films of Richard Attenborough, who, towards the end of his career, never saw a subject so interesting that he couldn’t turn it into a generic romance. Jesus Revolution, alas, fits that pattern, as it looks at the rise of the Jesus movement through the budding romance between Greg and his more counter-culturally minded girlfriend Cathe (Anna Grace Barlow), from their initial meet-cute through the ups and downs of their courtship to the final marriage proposal that is witnessed, in romantic-comedy fashion, by her family. Elements like these might make the film more digestible to a regular audience, but I am not sure that they give us any insight into what the Jesus movement was actually like.
Just as the film plays up those elements that might make the film more conventionally entertaining, it also plays down—if not outright ignores—those aspects of the Jesus movement that might make it less broadly appealing. There is no hint, for example, of the movement’s emphasis on the end times. (The real-life Smith made belief in the Rapture one of his church’s “foundational beliefs” and said there was “no excuse for ambiguity” on the subject.) The movie hedges its bets on whether the miracles performed by Lonnie Frisbee were genuine—everything we see onscreen is open to “rational” explanation—and it includes the miracles mainly to underscore the personality tensions growing within the movement, as Smith thinks the miracle-working is one of a few signs that Frisbee is letting his ego get the better of him. (In real life, Smith and Frisbee also had theological disagreements about the place of miracles in the modern church.) And of course, the film completely ignores Frisbee’s homosexuality. (A title card at the end says Frisbee died in 1993, but it does not say that he died of AIDS.)
Sex, drugs, and rock & roll: The film happily embraces that third element, and longtime fans of the Christian music scene will be happy to see actors re-enacting the earliest days of Love Song, a Christian rock band that is first seen playing in Smith’s living room before bringing its drums and guitars into Smith’s church services. (The church, Calvary Chapel, had its own music label—Maranatha! Music—which helped launch many Christian artists, including my favorite band of all time, Daniel Amos.)
But the film basically sidesteps the fact that sex and drugs overlapped with a lot of the early Christian hippie experiences of that time. In the 2005 documentary Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher, people who knew and lived with Lonnie talk about how he baptized people even when he was on drugs, and they marvel at how he was able to “party” on Saturday night and preach on Sunday morning. But the closest Jesus Revolution gets to any of this is when Frisbee meets Smith at his home in Costa Mesa, tells him about the people he lived with in San Francisco, and says, “We did everything and everyone”—which relegates all the sex and drugs to the past, before Lonnie’s preaching, and also neatly obscures exactly who and what Lonnie was doing personally back then.
The actor who plays Lonnie Frisbee is Jonathan Roumie, who is of course best-known for playing Jesus in The Chosen, a series that is nearly half-way through its planned seven-season arc. It’s kind of daring, getting an actor who is still playing Jesus to play a flawed human being whose conscious imitation of Jesus ends up being a sign of his spiritual pride, but Roumie handles the role well.
Roumie, at 48, is already one of the oldest actors to play Jesus, who was only 30 or so during the events depicted in The Chosen; and now Roumie is playing a Jesus lookalike who was only 20 or so during the events depicted in this movie. (Lonnie’s 20th birthday was one month before the first moon landing, which is alluded to in this film.) The Erwins announced their intention to make Jesus Revolution in March 2019—four weeks before the first season of The Chosen came out—and we can only wonder how this film might have been different if they had hired an actor closer to Frisbee’s age, as they were originally planning to do, rather than someone who gave their film an instant marketing hook.
Roumie isn’t the only thing this film has in common with The Chosen, but that’s all I’m going to say about that. Wouldn’t want to spoil the in-joke.
Interestingly, while Lonnie says he resembles Jesus, and Roumie was presumably cast as Lonnie to capitalize on that association, Roumie himself has called Lonnie a “John the Baptist” figure. I don’t know precisely what Roumie means by that, but, just as the biblical John the Baptist said he needed to become smaller so that Jesus could become greater, there is a sense in this film that Lonnie needs to become smaller so that someone else, be it Chuck or Greg, can become greater.
I do like the scene in which Cathe takes Greg to a music festival featuring figures like Janis Joplin and Timothy Leary, the latter of whom tells the audience they can be “reborn” after their psychedelic experiences. It feels like a genuine re-creation of the period, both in terms of production design and in terms of how it presents figures like Leary not as rivals or opponents but as expressions of the spiritual openness that was everywhere at that time.
DeVon Franklin, a real-life producer who occasionally does some acting (he played a preacher in the Erwin brothers’ 2015 sports film Woodlawn), plays Josiah, a reporter who is working on a story about the Jesus movement. Curiously, when Greg asks who Josiah is writing for, Josiah doesn’t say. And when the article finally appears, it is accompanied by photos—but I don’t think we ever saw a photographer. Suffice it to say I think any journalists covering this scene would have been a little more transparent or obvious about it than that.
It turns out Josiah is a writer for Time magazine, and the article he writes is the cover story about The Jesus Revolution that ran in June 1971. You might think, from this film, that the article is all about Chuck Smith and his church, but Smith & co. get only a single 136-word paragraph in the article, which is over 5,600 words in total, and Smith himself is never quoted in it. The article spends a lot more time on Catholic Pentecostalism than it does on Calvary Chapel.
Incidentally, there is one bit in that Time magazine article that made me laugh out loud—when a Christian Surfer says, “It’s so beautiful when you are with the Lord and catch a good ride”—and I really wish that Jesus Revolution had found some way to include that in its depiction of the subculture.
To sum up: I have said in the past that there are three basic types of filmmaking (and art in general), though they usually overlap to one degree or another:
there is entertainment, which caters to the desires of the audience;
there is propaganda, which pushes the desires of the artist;
and there is, for lack of a better word, art, which draws both audience and artist out of themselves and into something else, something that teases their curiosity and leaves them wanting a deeper emotional or intellectual engagement with the world.
Jesus Revolution, it seems to me, is essentially entertainment. A lot of the promotional materials for this film have emphasized its utility as propaganda—by saying that this film can encourage a new religious revival like the one it depicts—but the film’s sanitized depiction of that revival, and the central place it gives to Greg and Cathe’s genre-conforming romance, points in the other direction.
Which is a shame, because the Jesus movement is a phenomenon that really needs to be known and understood, warts and all. If the filmmakers had looked beyond the message they were trying to promote—and if they had been willing to draw the audience out of its comfort zone—they could have given us something to really think about. As it is, there’s very little that’s revolutionary here.
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I did not interview anyone in connection with this film, but I have interviewed a few of the people who worked on it in connection with other projects, e.g.:
I interviewed co-director Jon Erwin in 2018, when he was promoting the drama I Can Only Imagine and the documentary Steve McQueen: American Icon.
I took part in a group interview with co-star Kelsey Grammer in 2014, when he was on the set of Killing Jesus in Morocco.
I interviewed co-star DeVon Franklin in 2018, when he was on the Winnipeg set of Breakthrough, which he produced.
I also interviewed filmmaker David Di Sabatino when he released his documentary Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher in 2005. It is no exaggeration to say that Frisbee was largely written out of history prior to that point, and that Di Sabatino’s film put him back on the map—so if that film hadn’t existed, this film wouldn’t exist now either, or at any rate it might not have featured Frisbee so prominently.