With their short skirts and long legs, leather jackets and muscle cars, for the Baader Meinhof gang sex was as much a weapon as Molotov cocktails and machine-guns. It was also, through countless no-frills, no-ties couplings with hairy strangers in grubby squats, coopted as a political act.

With its initial emphasis on fast cars and faster women, political rhetoric and posing, it’s perhaps not surprising that The Baader Meinhof Complex, directed by Uli Edel and written and produced by Bernd Eichinger (Downfall), has been accused of glamorising terrorism. But this is not the case. Eichinger’s screenplay scratches under the surface of the key players in the Red Army Faction (RAF) – Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck), Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu) and Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) – and finds unexpectedly little.

Baader, in particular, despite his devilish charisma, is depicted as a shallow and image-obsessed hypocrite. There’s nothing particularly glamorous about a borderline psychotic living out his Hollywood outlaw fantasies at a cost of the lives of numerous innocent people. Nor, when the idealism has worn off and been replaced by petty accusations and niggling back-stabbing, do the RAF members seem quite as cool.

Times Archive, 1977: The end of the Baader-Meinhof gang

The trial beat all national records for length, expense and sensation

Whether or not this is an accurate portrayal of Baader and his cohorts is debatable, but it’s clear that Edel and Eichinger, although fascinated by these middle-class underground fighters, were determined not to give them an easy ride. The film-makers’ approach was factually driven, the style an unforgiving realism. The bloody aftermath of RAF terrorist attacks is recorded with the same unflinching and dispassionate eye as the group’s behind-the-scenes arguments.

This quasi-documentary approach extended to the script: Edel and Eichinger amassed a huge amount of research material. The dialogue, where possible, is based on authentic documented speeches or propaganda texts; archive footage and photography provided visual keys. This is all very diligent, but it makes for some rather clunky exchanges – Meinhof and Ensslin frequently hurl chunks of indigestible rhetoric at each other – and doesn’t help to humanise a group of characters who are already supremely difficult to like.

There is a real problem with a film that, although thoroughly researched and directed with integrity, struggles to move the audience. If we can’t connect with Meinhof, Baader and Ensslin, the three RAF members who are given a substantial back story, how can we care about the numerous interchangeable later members who take centre stage once the key players have been imprisoned?

The energy-sapping running time and the way that revolutionary zeal inexorably gives way to a sullen disillusionment makes this a long, relentless slog of a movie. Perhaps a 30-minute trim might have made the picture more rewarding.

18, 149 minutes

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