Movies / The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996)

It was the early 1970s, the twilight of the sexual revolution in America, when a sex industry entrepreneur named Larry Flynt leveraged a small string of Ohio strip-clubs into the beginnings of a publishing empire. Hustler was a raw and raunchy magazine that pushed the limits of American tolerance. Its publisher, a grade-school dropout and Kentucky redneck, was nobody's hero, but circumstance would cast him as the era's last crusader. It was a role that brought Larry Flynt both ruin and glory. Flynt becomes the unlikely champion of the First Amendment when he takes his fight against the Rev. Jerry Falwell all the way to the Supreme Court. Though his life, both public and private, was a tale told to America in soundbites and headlines, behind the scenes raged a story less familiar but no less striking: a story encompassing love and loss, redemption and despair, madness and healing.