n Portland, Oregon, in 1915, journalist Louise Trullinger nee Bryant (Diane Keaton) struggles to promote photographs at a gallery – including a controversial nude, in which she’s the model. Her husband (Nicolas Coster), a renowned dentist, is aghast, but she’s firm in her beliefs about art – and her own independence, complete with progressive leanings and sexual forwardness. Meanwhile, reporter John “Jack” Reed (Warren Beatty) is in town to raise money for the publication for which he writes, called The Masses. When they run into each other at the Liberal Club, and later at a dinner party, it’s something along the lines of love at first sight. They engage in discussions (disguised as an interview) about intellectual, newsworthy, and political things – all sorts of current events – that eventually segue into sex.

“How could anyone believe in marriage?” Jack invites Louise to Greenwich Village in New York, where she can mingle with fellow writers and likeminded free spirits, radicals, and rebels. She accepts, instantly thrust into the world of Emma Goldman (Maureen Stapleton), Max Eastman (Edward Herrmann), and Eugene O’Neill (Jack Nicholson) – the leading political activists and philosophers and playwrights of the era. Their ideas center around worldwide unionization (such as through the Industrial Workers of the World), the war against capitalism (instead of the encroaching war in Europe), and combating the injustices of social classes, but their gatherings result in police oppression and continual fighting between Jack and Louise.

“I’m not taken seriously when you’re around.” To escape the pressures on their relationship, they move to a conservative fishing village, where the people and crowds are scarcer, allowing them to write, put on plays, and continue their activism from a distance – while still maintaining their freedoms, particularly around free love and loose definitions for their relationship. “Politics sure plays hell with your poetry.”

The film employs an unusual framing device (and narrative interruptions), in which real people are interviewed, asked about their memories of Reed and Bryant. Some can’t even remember them; others mix up names or places or dates, but give tiny insights into – or recollections about – the characters, anecdotally suggesting various assumptions or qualities. It’s original, but it’s also unnecessary (despite reiterating the basis on real people, places, and actions), frequently disrupting the flow of the actual story, even if it bridges sudden gaps in time (dates flash onscreen anyway); anything that takes the viewer out of the moment, out of the drama, is disappointing at best.

Following along with historical events, as well as fictional extrapolations (such as personal complications in Croton-on-Hudson in 1916), the film touches upon Woodrow Wilson’s presidential campaign, the revolution in Russia during the spring of 1917, the United States’ declaration of war against Germany, the Socialist Party’s intentions around demonstrations against the draft, and the rise of Lenin. But at its heart, “Reds” is a love story, focused on the amiable highs and the tumultuous lows of the main characters’ partnership. At some points they’re blissfully happy, while at others they’re separated and toiling and pining.

With its epic length, “Reds” attains an epic feel, though its setting and premise and political views are never as striking (or as prominently defined) as the romance. Even when the graphic horrors of battle are glimpsed, or when Bryant and Reed are at odds, keeping their involvement strictly to professional collaborations for the sake of being war correspondents in Russia, the thought of an eventual reconciliation remains most powerful. Views of Reed alone on a couch, or his hoping to be invited to a small bed in a shared apartment, prove more potent than the dramatizations of looming insurrection. Even Reed’s emphatic speech during a protest is drowned out by Bryant striving to make eye contact – and then physical contact – from the back of the crowd; and when Louise throws a snowball at her lover in just a few-second shot from a montage, it’s consequential despite the patriotic music and the significant historical recreations that follow.

By 1918, as the United States is gripped by the First Red Scare, turning the likes of troublemaking Russian Revolution sympathizers Reed and Bryant into targets of Senate inquisitions, the film is still wisely framed around their relationship. Their affections strengthen or wane to match social upheavals – a few of which mirror notions from “Doctor Zhivago” and “Lawrence of Arabia.” When they get too caught up in their careers and positions, it’s always to the detriment of their contentedness with each other; heated arguments alternate with sentimental tenderness. And so, additional opportunities surface for them to part ways, again creating dour estrangements that lead to monumental homecomings. The wait is excruciating, but the final convergence of their periodically disparate paths – after an arduous journey across the world (like a wild goose chase) – is emotionally overwhelming. It’s an iconic scene well worth waiting for, and one that again highlights that love supersedes all else – particularly since the movie ends at the close of their personal love story, rather than at the culmination of some major geopolitical endeavor. “You chose the life of a revolutionary. She didn’t.”

– Mike Massie