Directed by Milos Forman. Written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. With Woody Harrelson, Courtney Love, Edward Norton, Brett Harrelson, Donna Hanover, James Cromwell, and Crispin Glover. A Columbia Pictures release. At the Copley Place, the Harvard Square, and the Circle and in the suburbs.

At the risk of deifying a self-serving pornographer and one of America's biggest assholes, I have to say that The People vs. Larry Flynt is one of the most compelling defenses of First Amendment rights ever committed to celluloid. It's vastly entertaining, raucously funny, and emotionally moving -- all the things that Flynt's publication, Hustler, is not.

Directed by Milos Forman, who knows from his experience in Communist Czechoslovakia in the '60s the insidious consequences of censorship, the film features bigger- (and better-) than-life performances from Woody Harrelson as the smutmeister and vulgarian Flynt and Courtney Love as his true love and eventual wife, ex-stripper and future junkie Althea Leasure. From this dross the actors and filmmakers fuse a sordid but radiant and authentic myth.

Forman revels in Flynt's tacky origins as proprietor of an unthriving strip joint where listless dancers undrape before a handful of inert patrons. Dressed in the most painful extremes of '70s fashion, Flynt is enduring complaints about his mismanagement and profligacy from brother Jimmy (Brett Harrelson, Woody's real-life sibling, and the dimmest bulb in an otherwise brilliant cast) when two inspirations strike him. The first is to advertise his establishment with a newsletter illustrated by beaver shots. The second is the arrival of a new dancer, 17-year-old Althea Leasure. "That girl has something," Larry muses to Jimmy. Indeed she has -- balls as big as Flynt's own. "I've heard you've slept with every girl in every one of your clubs," says Leasure. A minute later she adds, "So have I."

The newsletter, of course, becomes the infamous Hustler, and Leasure becomes Flynt's lover, wife, and the brains behind the publication. Sporting the dubious motto "A woman's vagina has as much personality as her face," the first issue is a fiasco. But the second, featuring nude photos of Jackie Onassis sunbathing in the Aegean, propels Flynt toward millionaire status.

It's not just the smut merchants who are opportunistic, however. Flynt's success is dogged by lawsuits from moral watchdogs ranging from future building-and-loan-scandal felon Jack Keating to the inevitable Jerry Falwell. Invariably the holier-than-though windbags are outclassed by Flynt's outrageous antics and the eloquent logic and acumen of his barely-dry-behind-the-ears attorney, conflict lawyer Alan Isaacman (Edward Norton, showing more of the uncannily understated wit and nuance that was the best part of Primal Fear). Low-key and acute, Isaacman is the long-suffering Apollonian restraint to Flynt's Dionysian excess.

The claim has been made that Larry Flynt trivializes the debate over free speech, with those arguing restraint portrayed as fanatical buffoons and the whole issue reduced to whether one can publish a cartoon in which Santa Claus has an erection. Actually, I think, the film expands Flynt's story into an exploration of what it means to be an American. A self-righteous huckster preaching a carnal fundamentalism, Flynt inhabits our strange national meeting ground of the sacred and profane, the hedonistic and the self-sacrificing, the anarchistic and intolerant.

So it's startling but not altogether surprising when the movie takes its strangest turn -- Flynt's creepily sexual seduction by Ruth Carter Stapleton (TV news correspondent Donna Hanover). His attempts to reconcile pornography and born-again Christianity are grotesquely funny and almost apt, but when the magazine starts losing money the pragmatic Althea gets Flynt back on the right track. His zealotry is undiminished, and he confronts his many lawsuits in a farcical crusade that culminates with his martyrdom outside a Memphis courthouse, as an assassin's bullet paralyzes him from the waist down.

Still, this is not a Christian allegory of redemption but a Greek tragedy about the catastrophic fall brought on by hubris. Wheelchair-bound, Flynt becomes more clownish, and more pathetic, as he pelts a judge with oranges or wears a diaper made from an American flag in court. The film's hilarious allegro slows to the cadence of an elegy as an alienated Isaacson deserts Flynt and Althea becomes addicted to the drugs he takes to ease his pain. His voice transformed into a croaking drawl like a cross between Jimmy Stewart and W.C. Fields, he grows into a bloated but compelling ruin, a lecherous Lear railing at the winds. "All I was guilty of was bad taste," cracks Flynt in better days. In fact, what he was guilty of was elevating bad taste into a defense of freedom.