There's a wrenching bittersweetness that comes of any evenhanded consideration of the Sixties' counterculture: a generation's innocence fades into naivety, gullibility, foolishness and culpability, but it's still there — underneath it all — a deep desire to remake the world, to shake off the mistakes and corruption of past generations and finally get things right. Peace. Love. Brotherhood. No wonder the kids were so remarkably simpatico with the story of Jesus. This musical Gospel, like its cousin from the same era, Godspell, doesn't necessarily have to be set in the Sixties: though both certainly emerged from that context in music and style. A more recent film version of Superstar (2000) has actually shed those specific cultural accoutrements to prove that underneath it all is a universal story, which, as C. S. Lewis said, is rooted in both myth and fact: the myth (or spirit) is eminently transferable to new settings: Florentine townsmen, Dutch householders, or indeed, the late 1960s-early 1970s as here.

But unlike director Norman Jewison's Fiddler on the Roof, the film version of this Broadway hit is less rooted in a historical setting than an odd amalgam of realism and fantasy — or, if you will, of letter and spirit. We're on location, in what seems to be the Judean desert, but the action transpires mostly on and around a minimalist theater set — made up of scaffolding, columns and ruined walls — and among the rocks and caves of the desolate landscape. The soundtrack opens over this stylized setting with Middle Eastern flourishes laced with heavy metal guitar. We watch as the players arrive in a beat-up old school bus, familiar to anybody who's seen Woodstock or Hair or read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Only this bus comes complete — packed on top with the sleeping bags and guitar cases — a life-size wooden cross. Shades of the Jesus People! Once again, remarkable instinctive affinities between that generation at that moment and this particular story. As the music works itself into an ominous jam, a bunch of flower children pour out of the bus and pull out all the props and costumes of the story they're about to enact. Obviously, this is the story of the idealistic youth rebelling against the Establishment, the entrenched powers, a very old, old story.

Yet the Gospel is more than simply rebellion against the Establishment; that's always been the sticking point — even in those Christ vs Rome epics, even if that wasn't always understood. But this version sets up firmly the inevitable conflict between angry radicals who want to burn down the System and the figure of Jesus, whose message is a frustration to all who believe power and cunning can be defeated by more power and more cunning. In many ways, the core conflict of Superstar is between Jesus and Judas. Here Judas is black, an echo of the violence and anger of Black Power gone wrong after MLK was murdered by The Man. "Listen, Jesus, I don't like what I see," he sings. "All I ask is that you listen to me..." Ted Neeley's Jesus sings back his message of love, sometimes as heated, sometimes soft and otherworldy in a vibrato'd wail that in another decade will be associated primarily with "hair bands". "Why are you obsessed with fighting Times and fates you can't defy? If you knew the path we're riding, you'd understand it less than I." The war of words over power vs love carries on into a vision of the afterlife, when Judas reprises "I don't know how to love him." The original setting of that number, as a newly-redeemed Mary Magdelene sings it over Jesus' sleeping form, is the unbearably lovely emotional highpoint of the score. "In these past few weeks, when I see myself, I seem like someone else. I don't know how to take this."

Meanwhile, the religious authorities, with their exaggerated popish hats, stand above it all on the scaffolding, debating what to do about this trouble-maker. "Listen to that howling mob… He's dangerous, this Christ." This debate is intercut with the groovily-worshipful Superstar chorus and verses: "Christ, you know I love you. I believe in you and God so tell me that I'm saved." The power of this spirit-over-letter treatment is demonstrated with brilliance as Christ "clears the temple," upsetting a bazaar full products — from weapons to women — making clear in a flash the truth that moneychangers who pollute the sacred are not limited to religious hucksters, but include all manner of commodification of the human spirit.

Jewison is not a "Sixties" kind of director, no Richard Lester or Dennis Hopper; rather, he seems a wise and sympathetic observer from across the Generation Gap, like Milos Foreman in Hair: sympathetic, but sad, because such observers see — as surely as the eyes of Jesus watching the Triumphal Entry chorus see — that this Woodstock Nation isn't enough, and ultimately will not last. Some complain that Superstar doesn't include a Resurrection, though traditionally the actor playing Jesus reappears for the curtain call dressed in white. The film offers no curtain call, but as the subdued actors return to their bus they take a long last look at Golgotha and the question in their minds echos through the silent credits: Who was that guy? What just happened here? Great questions.