Counterculture Variations

By Christopher Porterfield

Directed by JOAN MICKLIN SILVER

Screenplay by FRED BARRON

The scene is the ragtag headquarters of a Boston underground paper. A staffer takes a kinky sex ad for the personal column over the phone, then politely asks the caller whether he wants to pay by BankAmericard or Master Charge. Question: With credit policies like that, how underground can the paper or its readers really be?

The answer (not very) is engagingly set forth in Between the Lines, a comedy that plays some loose, funky variations on the counterculture blues. The movie portrays the Back Bay Mainline at the point in its evolution when it is dying as a cause and being born as an institution. The paper, once the voice of the radical fringe, has so flourished that a big commercial publisher wants to add it to his string of properties. The staffers have outlived their heady days of protest and dissent ("We were dangerous then," says one wistfully). They are coasting, but restlessly. The situation is a neat distillation of the moment in our cultural history when the 1960s turned into the 1970s--though the movie, in one of its few blunders, anomalously sets the action in the present.

Offhand Humor. The plot is as authentic and insubstantial as a whiff of marijuana (Screenwriter Barren is an alumnus of the Boston Phoenix and the Real Paper). One of the reporters cashes in on his underground experiences by selling a book. A beginner tries to expose a local record bootlegger. Lovers climb in and out of various beds. The new publisher takes over; one staffer is fired; another quits. The paper goes on.

Director Silver (Hester Street) is a bit studied and schematic in her juxtaposition of scenes, but she is attuned to the hip, offhand humor of the Mainline's newsroom. In one sequence, a bearded interloper hurls a typewriter to the floor in a self-styled act of conceptual art, only to have a group of staffers top him by smashing up the office and punching a hole in the wall.

Above all, what gives Between the Lines its special savor is the acting. To single out just a few of the relatively unknown but nifty cast: John Heard has wry charm and a quick satiric intelligence as Harry, the paper's erstwhile investigative ace, who knows it would be as phony to decry his lost innocence as to try to preserve it. Harry's girl friend, the staff photographer who is torn between career and romance, is well played by Lindsay Crouse. Stephen Collins is suitably slick as the ambitious book writer, and Jill Eikenberry makes a winsome receptionist-cum-presiding spirit. Some of the secondary roles blur into caricature in the writing but are still brought off with zest--notably by Jeff Goldblum as the freeloading rock critic.

Thanks largely to such performances as those, Between the Lines manages something that is much rarer and more difficult than it sounds. In a movie season populated by psychopaths, killers, sexual cripples and supernatural spirits, it enables you to spend a couple of hours in the company of a believable, thoroughly likable bunch of people. Christopher Porterfield

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