Sundance Film Festival features maverick visions

In its 31-year history, the Sundance Film Festival has often showcased the works of some of the country's most maverick movie makers. But as the prestigious gathering enters its opening weekend, there may never have been so many iconoclasts themselves up on the screen.

What's more, many of these subjects and themes come not from the Midnight Cowboy era of the 1960s that has so long dominated American cinema, but from the 1980s and 1990s, reflecting the interests of a younger generation of filmmakers.

Movies about author David Foster Wallace, musician Kurt Cobain, the National Lampoon, and martial-arts actor Chuck Norris are at the festival. So is an offering about the decidedly modern persona of daredevil Evel Knievel - produced by the quintessence of 21st century ditch-the-rules abandon, Johnny Knoxville.

Brett Morgen's Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck uses animation as well as unreleased music, art, and poetry to tell the story of the late Nirvana frontman.

"There's just something about making a movie of a man who changed music and showing him in a way we've never seen before," said Morgen, 46, who with this film moved from 1960s radicalism - Chicago 10 opened the festival eight years ago - to 1990s grunge.

The theme isn't limited to personality-driven films. The dystopian adventure Turbo Kid evokes the restlessness of 1980s dirt bike pioneers. The Ethan Hawke-starring Ten Thousand Saints is a tale of the 1980s downtown New York punk scene from the filmmakers behind American Splendor.

Sundance has long been a place of countercultural interests, but often with a 1960s spin. The festival was founded, after all, by Robert Redford, the paragon of baby boomer activism; movies spotlighting Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Central American injustice have gained notoriety here.

But as that seminal decade has receded, look-backs to a more Gen X-infused counterculture have grown more common. This year, they're everywhere.

The Lampoon movie, Drunk Stoned, shows how a few shake-the-system types came together in the 1970s to create a radical style of comedy that - through magazines, movies and other media - resonated well into the 1990s.

In Being Evel, Daniel Junge moves from the Oscar-winning realm of his somber Pakistani-attack documentary Saving Face to Knievel, who influenced a generation of kids in the 1970s and 1980s with his broken-boned brio, focusing in part on his not exactly glorious personal life.

In Chuck Norris vs. Communism, Romanian director Ilinca Calugareanu tells a hybrid documentary-narrative story about how 1980s figures such as Norris and Sylvester Stallone's Rambo character gave people in her native country hope during the worst days of communist rule, as they watched pirated VHS tapes at stealth apartment gatherings.