You’ve worn the T-shirt—now see the movie. Director Walter Salles (Central Station) and executive producer Robert Redford tap into the personality cult of Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara with this agreeable and weirdly apolitical road movie. Latin American hunk Gael Garcia Bernal stars as the 23-year-old preradicalized Guevara, drinking in the world as he and his friend Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna) tool around Argentina, Chile, and Peru on a sputtering motorcycle. The film has polarized critics on the left and right, but like John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln, it’s less a polemical statement than an exercise in mythmaking, with Guevara as the noble embodiment of South American solidarity. Unlike the Ford movie, it never conjures up any coherent drama of its own, focusing instead on the historical destiny of Bernal’s handsome messiah. In Spanish with subtitles. R, 126 min.
