Jesus Revolution is just alright
A review by M.C. Steffen
Part of giving any movie a fair shake is making an effort to grasp the codes it uses to communicate to its intended audience. In a musical, when characters sing, you’re meant to understand that they’re expressing emotions too overwhelming for mere speech; whether that convention is to your taste or not, you have to appreciate it on its own terms. This means, in a film made by and for evangelical Christians like Jesus Revolution, you have to appreciate that, when a character smokes pot and monologues about Andy Warhol, you’re meant to understand that they’re a hellbound sinner in desperate need of the redeeming love of Christ to fill the void that drugs and postmodern art only exacerbate.
Now, if you’re not already on board with this film’s worldview, you’re probably not going to find that convention persuasive. But I’ll say this for Jesus Revolution: at least it parses. Unlike such fundamentalist movies as, say, Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas, in which a nutcracker is used to represent one of Herod’s soldiers, and this is meant to convey that tacky consumerism at Christmas is a moral imperative. The codes in Jesus Revolution may not resonate with someone outside the choir it’s preaching to, but they’re internally consistent and (mostly) inoffensive. This means that, compared to something like Kevin Sorbo’s Left Behind: Now with More QAnon! from earlier this year, Jesus Revolution is a more representative and therefore more edifying missive from the American evangelical movement.
It also means, if your interest in this type of film aligns with mine, that it’s much less fun. I love a good-bad movie, and poorly constructed fundamentalist propaganda is disproportionately likely to scratch that itch. But Jesus Revolution isn’t poorly constructed; it’s mainly shockingly generic. In fact, it’s so determinedly generic that it ends up saying some very revealing things about how mainstream evangelicals want to be seen by the broader culture – and, perhaps more importantly, how they don’t want to be seen.
The film’s subject is the ministry of Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa in the late ’60s, which directly aimed its message at disaffected youth, and was led by an unlikely pair: conservative Silent Generation pastor Chuck Smith (Kelsey Grammer), and charismatic street preacher Lonnie Frisbee (Jonathan Roumie, who also plays Jesus in The Chosen). Smith initially looks down on the counterculture, but is impressed after a chance meeting with Frisbee, who preaches to his fellow burnouts that only Jesus can satisfy the spiritual yearning that they’ve been trying to soothe with drugs, sex, and leftist political action.
Smith gives Frisbee a platform, and together they transform the church from a small, staid congregation into a full, fervent house of worship that shares Jesus’ message of acceptance and healing to outcasts. Among their number is Greg Laurie (Joel Courtney), a depressed teen from a broken home who finds meaning in the church and is among the first to spread its message as part of what TIME called the "Jesus revolution,” which converted thousands of baby boomers to evangelicalism in the early ‘70s.
Laurie, who wrote the book on which the movie is based, has called Jesus Revolution “the most un-Christian ‘Christian’ movie” he’s seen, which he means as a compliment: “most Christian movies aren’t up to the standard they should be.” Let’s set aside titles like The Tree of Life or Scorsese’s Silence, granting that when evangelicals say “Christian” they mean “evangelical,” and agree that most films designed for this very particular demographic have abysmal production values. And I’ll further agree with Laurie that Jesus Revolution raises the bar of what this genre is capable of doing – up to a point.
This film is helmed by Jon Erwin, an actual film-school educated director whose credits include I Can Only Imagine, I Still Believe, and American Underdog, and a brief glance at the loglines for all those titles gives us a clear indication of Erwin’s specialty: polished, formulaic “inspirational” biopics, whose subjects are all evangelical figures. That’s the posture Jesus Revolution assumes: of course it takes an evangelical worldview, but to its credit (its enormous credit, grading these movies on an extremely generous curve), it’s less interested in preaching than in telling a story. As I mentioned, that story rests on plenty of conventions that won’t resonate with you if you don’t share its worldview – but even then, you could theoretically still appreciate it as a simple, feel-good “true story.”
Here’s the rub: I don’t enjoy simple, feel-good true stories, either.
And, besides its church setting, there’s precious little in Jesus Revolution to distinguish it from any other paint-by-numbers narrative about an unlikely team that builds a movement to create a change in the world, and finds that their work also changes them. Almost every beat here feels rotely conventional: Smith grumbles a little at the hippie commune that takes root in his backyard, but his heart softens when he listens to their music and hears that they truly love the Lord; Laurie is anxious about how he’ll connect to the congregation in his first sermon, but to his (not our) surprise, he does all right! It’s all nice and streamlined and completely predictable. That issue is compounded by the baldly functional dialogue, which continually prioritizes the Big, Abstract Themes over elements like human-sounding speech, or subtext. (“There are so many voices,” Smith remarks in one particularly clunky scene, “that it’s hard to hear the truth,” to which his wife responds, “The truth is always quiet. It’s the lies that are loud.”) And these conversations are usually assembled with bog-standard shot-reverse-shot continuity editing, making them boring to look at and listen to.
Erwin does what he can to make something compelling out of such mediocre material. Given the dialogue’s lack of depth, the performances are surprisingly sturdy; Grammer in particular sells his arc of quiet desperation giving way to a renewed sense of purpose. And we occasionally get a few original images, such as a striking, metaphorical baptism sequence that reminded me of the sunken place scene in Get Out. But I’m really grasping at straws here: Jesus Revolution is a largely forgettable experience, not really “bad” in any way unique to evangelical indie cinema so much as it’s merely mediocre in a way common to many secular, vaguely uplifting family features. Which is never much fun to watch or write about – except when you start to consider the relationship between the film’s pointedly anodyne form, and the deeper implications of its fundamentalist content.
There’s another respect in which Laurie says this movie raises the bar for evangelical cinema: unlike many “tidy and perfect” Christian message pictures, it digs deep into the messy, complex psychology that people going through such profound spiritual change really would grapple with. Or, at any rate, it tries to; unfortunately, it never does so persuasively. Partly this is on the writing. The film overall feels languid, but many pivotal scenes are paced way too quickly, with characters changing their minds about the message and mission of the church in the space of a few lines of blunt dialogue. Another problem lies in one particular filmmaking convention that Erwin seems addicted to, a staple of the “superficial inspirational true story” form: montages. Specifically, “signposting a dramatic change in this character’s life through a wordless, slackly edited series of cliché images while the treacly music you’d hear in a commercial for herpes medication assaults your eardrums”-style montages. As a result, those moments I mentioned earlier like Smith coming around on the hippies after hearing their Jesus music, and Laurie delivering his first sermon – already fairly conventional story beats – feel even less substantive because they don’t offer any information about what’s going on in the characters’ heads or hearts. Like the characters’ too-easily resolved arguments, the film vaguely gestures toward Point A (character is struggling) and Point B (character’s struggle is resolved with a little help from their God) without actually dramatizing the inner action that gets them from one to the other.
This is the biggest limitation of Jesus Revolution‘s aggressively middlebrow aesthetic: given the opportunity to engage with some truly difficult and rewarding questions about the connections between individual faith, the institution of the church, and the struggle between the mainstream and the counterculture, it instead retreats into pat answers and hollow sentimentality. Honestly, if you just swap out “believe in yourself” with “believe in Jesus,” the movie is basically trafficking in the exact same set of codes you see in secular feel-good movies that get churned out every year. And that, at least preliminarily, seems to suggest that Jesus Revolution, “the most non-Christian Christian movie,” goes out of its way to resemble a non-Christian movie in order to appeal to a wider audience.
That reading seems even more compelling when we think about the less-palatable fundamentalist elements of the Jesus movement, like its fearmongering fixation on the end-times, that the film leaves out. Which brings me to my most confounding disappointment with Jesus Revolution: its queer erasure. Lonnie Frisbee was eventually excommunicated from the evangelical church, partly due to doctrinal disputes between him and other leaders, but mainly because he was revealed to have had affairs with men. In 1993, he died of complications from AIDS; at his funeral, Chuck Smith delivered a eulogy comparing Frisbee to Samson – “a man who knew the powerful anointing of God’s light,” but “who never experienced the ultimate of the potential” because of his sexual sin. In contrast, Jesus Revolution depicts Frisbee leaving Calvary Church of his own volition, after a series of clashes with Smith over their doctrinal disagreements and over the arrogance that the script imputes on film-Lonnie. When he makes a string of self-inflating statements to the media about his role in the church, Smith tells him to “check his ego,” prompting an insecure Frisbee to claim that Smith is jealous of him and storm out of his office, and out of the movie. A brief post-film “where are they now?” sequence flatly informs us that Frisbee and Smith “eventually reconciled” before his death, and that is the end of the story.
Now, do I wish that Jesus Revolution had faithfully represented Frisbee’s sexual orientation and depicted the fallout of his outing for his life and the movement? Honestly, no, given that an evangelical-written and –targeted version of that story would only ever frame Frisbee as a “flawed” saint, as Smith did. And given the film’s desire to reach a mainstream audience, it’s obvious why Erwin and co. would sidestep any material that the fence-sitters in the audience would find homophobic. But this part of Frisbee’s story is a particularly compelling example of the sort of inner turmoil that one of its characters would feel as they grapple with their fundamentalist beliefs, that the film, which aspires toward that kind of psychological realism, dutifully avoids.
Moreover, it threatens to put the lie to the movie’s whole ethos of radical acceptance and embracing the outcast. And it’s frustrating that, rather than attempt to work through this tension, the filmmakers take the coward’s way out by striking Frisbee’s sexuality from the record. It’s ultimately duplicitous: Jesus Revolution wants to be a slick, syrupy advertisement for fundamentalist evangelicalism, so much so that it bends over backwards to avoid the difficult implications of that worldview.
All this could launch a thousand thinkpieces, but I’d be remiss as a critic if I didn’t end by emphasizing that this movie is far, far more interesting to talk about than it is to watch – at least for an apostate like me.
I said earlier that my beef with Jesus Revolution – its tendency to gloss over the psychological events that drive its characters’ development – can be read as a feint toward mainstream feel-good filmmaking, but I’m not actually convinced by that interpretation. When I think about those fluffy montages that remind me of generic “things get better because the protagonist believes in himself” beats from secular movies, I wonder here they instead constitute another code, one uniquely aimed at an evangelical audience. What if we’re not meant to understand, or even feel like we understand, what’s going on inside the character’s head in these moments? What if these sequences are trying, even in a banal way, to instead gesture toward a supernatural change in the character’s heart that defies understanding?
“It’s not something to be explained,” film-Laurie says to the TIME reporter who serves as the skeptical audience’s surrogate. “It’s something to be experienced.” If you’re already on this movie’s wavelength, I don’t doubt you’ll experience what it wants you to. I couldn’t. And, to be fair, I don’t expect the film to explain that experience to me, either. But to explore it, in its living, breathing complexity? Nah. That’s where Jesus Revolution would rather do the evangelical equivalent of turning on, tuning in, and dropping out.
M.C. Steffen is a writer, storyteller, and teacher based in Chicago. He loves writing and thinking about stories that challenge the ways in which we think about stories. As a movie buff, he enjoys obscurant arthouse films and surreally terrible B-movies in equal measure. You can see him performing autobiographical monologues on Chicago stages, and writing overly theoretical movie reviews on Letterboxd.
Part of giving any movie a fair shake is making an effort to grasp the codes it uses to communicate to its intended audience. In a musical, when characters sing, you’re meant to understand that they’re expressing emotions too overwhelming for mere speech; whether that convention is to your taste or not, you have to appreciate it on its own terms. This means, in a film made by and for evangelical Christians like Jesus Revolution, you have to appreciate that, when a character smokes pot and monologues about Andy Warhol, you’re meant to understand that they’re a hellbound sinner in desperate need of the redeeming love of Christ to fill the void that drugs and postmodern art only exacerbate.
Now, if you’re not already on board with this film’s worldview, you’re probably not going to find that convention persuasive. But I’ll say this for Jesus Revolution: at least it parses. Unlike such fundamentalist movies as, say, Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas, in which a nutcracker is used to represent one of Herod’s soldiers, and this is meant to convey that tacky consumerism at Christmas is a moral imperative. The codes in Jesus Revolution may not resonate with someone outside the choir it’s preaching to, but they’re internally consistent and (mostly) inoffensive. This means that, compared to something like Kevin Sorbo’s Left Behind: Now with More QAnon! from earlier this year, Jesus Revolution is a more representative and therefore more edifying missive from the American evangelical movement.
It also means, if your interest in this type of film aligns with mine, that it’s much less fun. I love a good-bad movie, and poorly constructed fundamentalist propaganda is disproportionately likely to scratch that itch. But Jesus Revolution isn’t poorly constructed; it’s mainly shockingly generic. In fact, it’s so determinedly generic that it ends up saying some very revealing things about how mainstream evangelicals want to be seen by the broader culture – and, perhaps more importantly, how they don’t want to be seen.
The film’s subject is the ministry of Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa in the late ’60s, which directly aimed its message at disaffected youth, and was led by an unlikely pair: conservative Silent Generation pastor Chuck Smith (Kelsey Grammer), and charismatic street preacher Lonnie Frisbee (Jonathan Roumie, who also plays Jesus in The Chosen). Smith initially looks down on the counterculture, but is impressed after a chance meeting with Frisbee, who preaches to his fellow burnouts that only Jesus can satisfy the spiritual yearning that they’ve been trying to soothe with drugs, sex, and leftist political action.
Smith gives Frisbee a platform, and together they transform the church from a small, staid congregation into a full, fervent house of worship that shares Jesus’ message of acceptance and healing to outcasts. Among their number is Greg Laurie (Joel Courtney), a depressed teen from a broken home who finds meaning in the church and is among the first to spread its message as part of what TIME called the "Jesus revolution,” which converted thousands of baby boomers to evangelicalism in the early ‘70s.
Laurie, who wrote the book on which the movie is based, has called Jesus Revolution “the most un-Christian ‘Christian’ movie” he’s seen, which he means as a compliment: “most Christian movies aren’t up to the standard they should be.” Let’s set aside titles like The Tree of Life or Scorsese’s Silence, granting that when evangelicals say “Christian” they mean “evangelical,” and agree that most films designed for this very particular demographic have abysmal production values. And I’ll further agree with Laurie that Jesus Revolution raises the bar of what this genre is capable of doing – up to a point.
This film is helmed by Jon Erwin, an actual film-school educated director whose credits include I Can Only Imagine, I Still Believe, and American Underdog, and a brief glance at the loglines for all those titles gives us a clear indication of Erwin’s specialty: polished, formulaic “inspirational” biopics, whose subjects are all evangelical figures. That’s the posture Jesus Revolution assumes: of course it takes an evangelical worldview, but to its credit (its enormous credit, grading these movies on an extremely generous curve), it’s less interested in preaching than in telling a story. As I mentioned, that story rests on plenty of conventions that won’t resonate with you if you don’t share its worldview – but even then, you could theoretically still appreciate it as a simple, feel-good “true story.”
Here’s the rub: I don’t enjoy simple, feel-good true stories, either.
And, besides its church setting, there’s precious little in Jesus Revolution to distinguish it from any other paint-by-numbers narrative about an unlikely team that builds a movement to create a change in the world, and finds that their work also changes them. Almost every beat here feels rotely conventional: Smith grumbles a little at the hippie commune that takes root in his backyard, but his heart softens when he listens to their music and hears that they truly love the Lord; Laurie is anxious about how he’ll connect to the congregation in his first sermon, but to his (not our) surprise, he does all right! It’s all nice and streamlined and completely predictable. That issue is compounded by the baldly functional dialogue, which continually prioritizes the Big, Abstract Themes over elements like human-sounding speech, or subtext. (“There are so many voices,” Smith remarks in one particularly clunky scene, “that it’s hard to hear the truth,” to which his wife responds, “The truth is always quiet. It’s the lies that are loud.”) And these conversations are usually assembled with bog-standard shot-reverse-shot continuity editing, making them boring to look at and listen to.
Erwin does what he can to make something compelling out of such mediocre material. Given the dialogue’s lack of depth, the performances are surprisingly sturdy; Grammer in particular sells his arc of quiet desperation giving way to a renewed sense of purpose. And we occasionally get a few original images, such as a striking, metaphorical baptism sequence that reminded me of the sunken place scene in Get Out. But I’m really grasping at straws here: Jesus Revolution is a largely forgettable experience, not really “bad” in any way unique to evangelical indie cinema so much as it’s merely mediocre in a way common to many secular, vaguely uplifting family features. Which is never much fun to watch or write about – except when you start to consider the relationship between the film’s pointedly anodyne form, and the deeper implications of its fundamentalist content.
There’s another respect in which Laurie says this movie raises the bar for evangelical cinema: unlike many “tidy and perfect” Christian message pictures, it digs deep into the messy, complex psychology that people going through such profound spiritual change really would grapple with. Or, at any rate, it tries to; unfortunately, it never does so persuasively. Partly this is on the writing. The film overall feels languid, but many pivotal scenes are paced way too quickly, with characters changing their minds about the message and mission of the church in the space of a few lines of blunt dialogue. Another problem lies in one particular filmmaking convention that Erwin seems addicted to, a staple of the “superficial inspirational true story” form: montages. Specifically, “signposting a dramatic change in this character’s life through a wordless, slackly edited series of cliché images while the treacly music you’d hear in a commercial for herpes medication assaults your eardrums”-style montages. As a result, those moments I mentioned earlier like Smith coming around on the hippies after hearing their Jesus music, and Laurie delivering his first sermon – already fairly conventional story beats – feel even less substantive because they don’t offer any information about what’s going on in the characters’ heads or hearts. Like the characters’ too-easily resolved arguments, the film vaguely gestures toward Point A (character is struggling) and Point B (character’s struggle is resolved with a little help from their God) without actually dramatizing the inner action that gets them from one to the other.
This is the biggest limitation of Jesus Revolution‘s aggressively middlebrow aesthetic: given the opportunity to engage with some truly difficult and rewarding questions about the connections between individual faith, the institution of the church, and the struggle between the mainstream and the counterculture, it instead retreats into pat answers and hollow sentimentality. Honestly, if you just swap out “believe in yourself” with “believe in Jesus,” the movie is basically trafficking in the exact same set of codes you see in secular feel-good movies that get churned out every year. And that, at least preliminarily, seems to suggest that Jesus Revolution, “the most non-Christian Christian movie,” goes out of its way to resemble a non-Christian movie in order to appeal to a wider audience.
That reading seems even more compelling when we think about the less-palatable fundamentalist elements of the Jesus movement, like its fearmongering fixation on the end-times, that the film leaves out. Which brings me to my most confounding disappointment with Jesus Revolution: its queer erasure. Lonnie Frisbee was eventually excommunicated from the evangelical church, partly due to doctrinal disputes between him and other leaders, but mainly because he was revealed to have had affairs with men. In 1993, he died of complications from AIDS; at his funeral, Chuck Smith delivered a eulogy comparing Frisbee to Samson – “a man who knew the powerful anointing of God’s light,” but “who never experienced the ultimate of the potential” because of his sexual sin. In contrast, Jesus Revolution depicts Frisbee leaving Calvary Church of his own volition, after a series of clashes with Smith over their doctrinal disagreements and over the arrogance that the script imputes on film-Lonnie. When he makes a string of self-inflating statements to the media about his role in the church, Smith tells him to “check his ego,” prompting an insecure Frisbee to claim that Smith is jealous of him and storm out of his office, and out of the movie. A brief post-film “where are they now?” sequence flatly informs us that Frisbee and Smith “eventually reconciled” before his death, and that is the end of the story.
Now, do I wish that Jesus Revolution had faithfully represented Frisbee’s sexual orientation and depicted the fallout of his outing for his life and the movement? Honestly, no, given that an evangelical-written and –targeted version of that story would only ever frame Frisbee as a “flawed” saint, as Smith did. And given the film’s desire to reach a mainstream audience, it’s obvious why Erwin and co. would sidestep any material that the fence-sitters in the audience would find homophobic. But this part of Frisbee’s story is a particularly compelling example of the sort of inner turmoil that one of its characters would feel as they grapple with their fundamentalist beliefs, that the film, which aspires toward that kind of psychological realism, dutifully avoids.
Moreover, it threatens to put the lie to the movie’s whole ethos of radical acceptance and embracing the outcast. And it’s frustrating that, rather than attempt to work through this tension, the filmmakers take the coward’s way out by striking Frisbee’s sexuality from the record. It’s ultimately duplicitous: Jesus Revolution wants to be a slick, syrupy advertisement for fundamentalist evangelicalism, so much so that it bends over backwards to avoid the difficult implications of that worldview.
All this could launch a thousand thinkpieces, but I’d be remiss as a critic if I didn’t end by emphasizing that this movie is far, far more interesting to talk about than it is to watch – at least for an apostate like me.
I said earlier that my beef with Jesus Revolution – its tendency to gloss over the psychological events that drive its characters’ development – can be read as a feint toward mainstream feel-good filmmaking, but I’m not actually convinced by that interpretation. When I think about those fluffy montages that remind me of generic “things get better because the protagonist believes in himself” beats from secular movies, I wonder here they instead constitute another code, one uniquely aimed at an evangelical audience. What if we’re not meant to understand, or even feel like we understand, what’s going on inside the character’s head in these moments? What if these sequences are trying, even in a banal way, to instead gesture toward a supernatural change in the character’s heart that defies understanding?
“It’s not something to be explained,” film-Laurie says to the TIME reporter who serves as the skeptical audience’s surrogate. “It’s something to be experienced.” If you’re already on this movie’s wavelength, I don’t doubt you’ll experience what it wants you to. I couldn’t. And, to be fair, I don’t expect the film to explain that experience to me, either. But to explore it, in its living, breathing complexity? Nah. That’s where Jesus Revolution would rather do the evangelical equivalent of turning on, tuning in, and dropping out.
M.C. Steffen is a writer, storyteller, and teacher based in Chicago. He loves writing and thinking about stories that challenge the ways in which we think about stories. As a movie buff, he enjoys obscurant arthouse films and surreally terrible B-movies in equal measure. You can see him performing autobiographical monologues on Chicago stages, and writing overly theoretical movie reviews on Letterboxd.
