David Gilbert, Bill Ayers

Directors: Sam Green, Bill Siegel

The film: The late 1960s were a wild time in the US, as students and peace activists hit the streets screaming about social injustices and the war in Vietnam. Lurking in the shadows of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), came the Weathermen - a group who felt sure the government would fall and that social change would sweep the globe.

Unlike the SDS, though, the Weathermen advocated aggression, calling a nation to arms and - when the war ended and their causes fell out of public focus - going underground to stage a bombing campaign against the government and big business that would last until the dawn of the 1980s.

Most of those facts are surprising enough to those not versed in the social climes in the US of the period, and we can suppose that's why directors Sam Green and Bill Siegel decided to shed some light on the whole sorry mess. And a mess it really was. This was a bunch of middle-class white kids who chose the wrong road - violence - despite whatever worthy causes they professed to believe in or even support. They made their mistakes - a thankfully botched plan to blow up an army dance claimed the lives of three of their members when the bomb they were working on exploded in their house - but still almost all held onto some notion that they were doing right.

Covering more than a decade in just 90 minutes proves a tough task for the filmmakers. You end up with questions spinning around in your head. How did they survive on the run for almost 10 years? Why was the FBI unable to prosecute most of them when they finally emerged from hiding to surrender? And what the hell were they thinking with those haircuts?

Archival footage interspersed with recent interviews with members of the group gives the whole thing weight - and makes it an extremely watchable experience. But you end up wanting to know more.

The extras: The extras fill in some, but not all of the blanks, especially the commentary from Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. The filmmakers get in on the act, too, and provide some good insights into how the whole thing was researched. There are bits from Emile de Antonio's film Underground, which show the team (faces blacked out) in full-on rant mode. A 20-minute interview with David Gilbert, titled A Lifetime of Struggle, gives him some chance to explain just why he got involved - and why he's serving 75 years minimum in prison. Again, despite all he's done, you come away feeling for the man and his beliefs. Two of the Weathermen's original tape recordings are included, as well as a statement from the filmmakers explaining why they took the project on.

The verdict: Fascinating but flawed.