for roughly its first half, "The People vs. Larry Flynt" is the most American American movie of the year. Wily, rambunctious and crude, the movie tells the only-in-America story of the porn prince's rise to the top of the smut heap and the censorship battles that culminated with his vindication by the Supreme Court. At its best, the picture puts a sly spin on the the wide-eyed naïveté of patriots who love to tell kids that, in the US of A, anyone can grow up to be president. The cause for flag-waving here is that any sleazeball can have his case heard by the highest court in the land.

The frequently funny and wildly uneven script by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski ("Ed Wood") operates on two basic assumptions: the country is divided into hustlers and rubes and there is no freedom of the press. The movie opens with Larry as a dirty-faced kid peddling moonshine, and jumps ahead 20 years to find him a dirty-minded young go-getter (played by Woody Harrelson) peddling flesh in his strip club. Harrelson, done up in a curly hairdo and an amazing succession of polyester sport jackets, plays Larry as a man with a persistent vision and a perpetual hard-on. His mind is whirring with ways to expand his business while he's scheduling dates an hour apart with his strippers. He's a scuzzbucket Horatio Alger whose ideas of good business opportunities are hilariously low. Hustler, which got its start as a newsletter promoting his club, proves that it has its finger firmly on the pulse of America when it publishes surreptitiously taken shots of a nude Jackie O.

For a while, as the moralists start to come out of the woodwork and chase Larry through the courts, "The People vs. Larry Flynt" plays like a dirty Tom and Jerry cartoon. (The funniest of the prudes is James Carville, who plays a prosecutor trying Larry for obscenity as a guy that Tennessee Williams' Big Daddy might dub "all hawk and no spit.") Had "The People vs. Larry Flynt" been made by Preston Sturges or the Jonathan Demme of "Citizen's Band" and "Melvin and Howard," it might have followed through to a satisfying satirical conclusion.

But the movie has been entrusted to Milos Forman, who's puffed himself up to give interviews about how the Nazis and the Communists went after the pornographers first, and how we should be ever-vigilant about the First Amendment. As a card-carrying member of the ACLU, I agree with Forman. But can't we just enjoy a movie about an unregenerate pornographer who rubbed people's noses in what offended them, without the civics lesson? Sure, when the Rehnquist Supreme Court stands up unanimously for Flynt over Jerry Falwell it's a genuine triumph for free speech. It's also a pretty funny one. There's a good-natured moment when Larry's lawyer, Alan Isaacman (shrewdly played by the gifted young actor Edward Norton), arguing the Falwell lawsuit before the Supreme Court, makes an offhand joke that prompts Justice Scalia to act as his straight man. The loose give-and-take of the scene feels like a more honest acknowledgement of what's great about the system — the opportunity for adversaries to indulge in open, generous-spirited debate.

But it's an exception. What's fun about the movie is that it pisses on things like virtue, monogamy, God and patriotism. (It's fitting that, in the second half of the movie, after Larry has been paralyzed by a would-be assassin's bullet, Harrelson talks in the nasal squawk of W.C. Fields.) By the time Larry is giving a lecture while intercutting slides of porn with slides of the Holocaust and asking which is more obscene, or appearing as the Spirit-of-'76 flag-bearer at his bicentennial party, the ironies have started to thud. And when Larry starts to cherish his Constitutional rights, the picture gives up the chance to make a tougher point.

When Larry appears in court in battle helmet, wearing the flag as a diaper, talking gibberish or openly abusing the judge, he's not just grandstanding. He's in contempt of court because the court is in contempt of him. The method to his madness is this: if a law protects your right to free speech, a law can take it away. That's a rather sophisticated point, and not one likely to be seconded by people who are intent on making "Mr. Flynt Goes to Washington."

Perhaps because he directed "Amadeus," or perhaps because Americans make certain assumptions about foreign filmmakers, Milos Forman has earned the reputation of a cultured man. But there has always been something quintessentially Eastern European about his films to me, something hearty and dreary at the same time. I've seen enough movies shot by Philippe Rousselot ("Henry and June," "Where the Heart Is") to make a pretty fair guess that it's not his fault this one looks like dirty dishwater. Except for Sidney Lumet, there may be no other major director with less visual sense, less sensuality than Milos Forman. "Larry Flynt" should have a slick, whorish look, but there's no juice in Forman's sleaze. Hustler's centerfolds look like Renoirs next to the cold-eyed way Forman shoots women's bodies.

And Forman's a rhythmless director. To be fair, there may be nowhere for this story to go but down, what with the attack that leaves Larry paralyzed and the AIDS death of his junkie-stripper wife Althea, played by Courtney Love. But a filmmaker with a little more flair might have given us the weirdly affecting love story between Larry and Althea without derailing the satirical gusto of the first half. And one with more sensitivity might have treated Courtney Love's first major role with more care.

As the buzz about her performance has grown, I've been pulling for Love. The painful thing about watching her turn herself into tabloid fodder is that it confirmed the suspicions of people all-too-ready to dismiss her as a no-talent harridan. At her best, Love's Althea is spirited and touching. She so disarms Larry — getting him to propose to her, coming up with even dirtier ideas for the magazine than he does — that you have no trouble believing he's nuts about her.

But this is the sort of bummer role that always winds up winning actresses acclaim because they get to fall apart in scene after scene. Forman hasn't worked with her on how to move or talk, and so the performance loses focus. (He can't even bother to shoot her decently. In shot after shot, she's badly lit or has hair hanging in her face.) And after awhile I begin to think that's because he doesn't think that Courtney Love needs to act to play a junkie tramp. He's too busy congratulating himself on the coup of casting her to direct her performance.

Forman knows damn well the tabloid voyeurism he's exploiting when he lingers over Love shooting up. There's a subtle put-down at work here, as if Forman has set out to make people believe that — good or bad — Love isn't acting. Nobody, whether it's their first big role or their hundredth, deserves that kind of treatment.

"The People vs. Larry Flynt" is ultimately a worse disappointment than an out-and-out stinker would be, because of its lively, entertaining first half. Forman clumps through the material like Larry's hillbilly parents who show up one night at his mansion, Ma and Pa Kettle stumbling into an orgy. Even a sleazebag's story deserves to be told with a little style.