![]() He made grandiose pronouncements from his wheelchair as if it were a throne. “Larry Flynt for President” covers the period in which Flynt transitioned from being a mostly-behind-the-scenes smut peddler, a dirty redneck cherub who raked in $10 million a month from his meat-grinder version of Playboy, to the damaged, marble-mouthed free-speech ringleader with a sixth sense for how to exploit himself. It was a mud-slinging circus, an all-out assault on decorum in politics, though with a serious issue at its heart: Flynt’s absolutist defense of the First Amendment. The joke no one could possibly know at the time is that as seen today, in Nadia Szold’s lively archival documentary “ Larry Flynt for President,” the Flynt campaign now looks like a trashy, penny-ante anticipation of the 2016 Donald Trump campaign - or, at least, certain aspects of it. In Flynt’s words, the campaign would be “an act of satire and rebellion against Reagan’s America.” The joke of it is that Flynt, a shrewd megalomaniac, literally thought he could win. It was a rolling publicity stunt, an anything-goes kamikaze assault on the very idea of government. ![]() ![]() ![]() The Larry Flynt “presidential campaign,” launched in 1983, was a tawdry piece of low-life media guerrilla performance art that made the 1968 mock candidate Pat Paulsen look like Bernie Sanders. ![]()
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