Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel

If your sole image of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner is that of a lanky, silk-jammied sybarite strolling the grounds of his mansion with a jiggling blond on either arm, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel will knock your socks off.

Unfortunately, Berman skips past the darker implications of Hefner's sexual universe and omits discussion of how the periodical business -- and access to erotic imagery -- has changed in the Internet age. Still, the movie remains an involving look at an American icon as well as an adept snapshot of our national zeitgeist from the McCarthy era through the Reagan years.

The film is at its most potent delineating Hefner's role in the American civil rights movement, going beyond the pages of his magazine.

One wants to find enlightenment - or at least entertainment - in this reconsideration of Playboy and of Hefner. But it's tainted.

A very mixed bag. Despite some faint gestures in the direction of journalistic balance, it plays a lot like a two-hour infomercial for the Playboy publisher's historical importance, philosophical depth and personal greatness.

This fawning docu goes to lengths to portray the octogenarian Playboy magazine founder as among the greatest figures of 20th-century American popular culture, while only cursorily acknowledging his status as a pioneering softcore pornographer.

A proper profile of Hefner would start and end with sex, and not merely glance on casualties like Dorothy Stratten (and even the loveless Hef himself). The movie can't seem to get it up.