Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #188: The Motorcyle Diaries (2004).

Most of us know his image, having seen it staring back at us from a poster, T-shirt or some other kind of memorabilia. But there's a far less well-known part of Ernesto "Che" Guevara's life that helped shaped him into the Argentine guerilla revolutionary he became. In 1952, he and his biochemist friend Alberto Granado embarked on a nine-month motorcycle journey of Latin America, which began with youthfully hedonistic adventures but gradually became, for Guevara, a conscience-awakening discovery of everything he came to believe was wrong with that region. Guevara kept a diary of the trip, and that diary became a bestseller and then Brazilian director Walter Salles' 2004 film The Motorcycle Diaries.

Here, Gabriel Garcia Bernal appropriately plays Guevara just as a serious and rather petulant but disciplined young student as opposed to a fists-in-the-air freedom fighter, but more impressive is Rodrigo de la Serna as Granado, who becomes more of a diplomatic voice of reason to Guevara's firebrand activist rather than a conventional wingman; the real Alberto, aged 82, also makes a cameo at the end. But while Salles coaxes these compelling performances from his two leads, his direction is very uneven. He paces the travelling scenes with engaging briskness, but the others are so relaxed they threaten to derail everything else and while the road scenes are strikingly well-shot, there's also not enough music to really enhance the culture that's being literally and visually explored here (although its theme song, Al Otro Lado del Rio, won an Oscar). However, Jose Rivera's screenplay is consistently eloquent and authentic.

Overall, The Motorcycle Diaries is a watchable coming-of-age film, but as a recreation of a journey that turned an impressionable young student into an iconic revolutionary for his downtrodden people, it needs more fuel in its engine.