Director: Uli Edel, 18, 150min

Stars: Martina Gedeck, Moritz Bleibtreu, Johanna Wokalek

On selected release

A portrait of the charismatic, leather-jacketed German outlaws who wore their radicalism like an accessory; a snapshot of a simpler, more naive time when the use of violence as a political instrument was considered “cool” – the German real-life drama The Baader Meinhof Complex walks through a minefield of controversial topics.

The route through the ten-year story of the Red Army Faction is navigated by meticulous research. Actual conversational transcripts and genuine written texts are used wherever possible; eyewitness accounts were studied; photographs and film from the time were used as visual keys. This preoccupation with factual accuracy, which has been stressed at every opportunity by the writer-producer Bernd Eichinger and the director Edel, is presumably a means to counter charges of romanticising the ruthless but charismatic figures at the heart of the RAF.

Gedeck makes a chilly Ulrike Meinhof, the journalist who turned her back on her children and on the more conventional means of arguing her case in favour of joining the RAF. Bleibtreu brings a temperamental unpredictability to his portrayal of Andreas Baader, the BMW-driving sociopath whose volatile personal magnetism fired the revolutionary zeal of his followers. And Wokalek is unwaveringly focused as Baader’s girlfriend, Gudrun Ensslin. These three characters are the only ones who merit any in-depth development; they are the constants who remain central to the story. They are not, it has to be said, easy people to spend time with – they are given to hurling indigestible chunks of rhetoric at each other like Molotov cocktails.

Problematically, we don’t get to know or understand the motivations of any of the other members – even those who take centre stage once the three key figures are imprisoned. It makes the second half of the film curiously uninvolving, even as the spiralling tensions between Meinhof and Ensslin exert a morbid fascination.

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