Wild in The Streets is so corrosively powerful that its total implausibility, intense cynicism, and depressing story are rendered one giant moot point. Streets deserves a cult revival, or at the very least a DVD release. It is a fascinating cultural artifact of the late 1960s.

Max Frost is the biggest musician in the world. He ran away from home at a young age, destroying his home and burning the family car because he despised his possessive, domineering mother (played with the intensity of a amplifier feedback by Shelly Winters) and eventually -- and inexplicably -- wound up a multimillionaire rock star. Only 24-years-old Max decides to support the campaign of Johnny Fergus (Hal Holbrook), who is campaigning on a platform of lowering the voting age to 18. Frost initially appears on behalf of Fergus but quickly realizes it is he who controls the youth of America, and thus has the power, so he begins making demands. Soon the platform calls for a voting age of 14, and (without spoiling too much), Max assumes the Presidency and, through the liberal use of LSD, remolds the United States as he sees fit.

Though produced by the low-budget drive-in experts American International Pictures, Wild in the Streets is more thoughtful, with higher production values, than any of the company’s cinematic contemporaries. For a psychedelic drug movie, it contains a significant amount of subtext and philosophical weight, and manages to critique both sides of the youth movement debate, cleverly skewering both the Johnson administration’s restrictive policies for the old and the elite, as well as youth’s overeagerness for violent revolution, drug use, and free love. As critic and historian Jack Stevenson notes in Addicted, his book on the history of drugs in cinema, “if we can call [Wild in the Streets] an exploitation film, it’s a divinely inspired one.”

If Streets was keyed into its own time period, it remains strangely vital in our own society. Its commentary on the dangerous allure of celebrity is still dead-on; the scene in which Mrs. Frost discovers her runaway son is now a hugely successful musician and proudly proclaims, “I’m the mother of a famous man! I’m a celebrity!” rings even truer in the era of reality television than it did in the era of Andy Warhol.

Ultimately, the film could only have come from AIP. A major studio would never have allowed a film that proposed such radical social change (even if it cautioned against extremism), nor one that allowed such a nuanced portrayal of such controversial topics as the draft and drug use. The rhetoric of the Cold War -- of the encroaching godless, socialistic hordes -- is used over and over in the film to imply that Max Frost and his crew may have many good ideas, may even deserve some of the freedom they fight for, but still pose an inevitable threat to our society. In one of the smartest ironic touches of the film’s final act, Frost’s heavily armed police force add the peace sign to their traditional uniform, so that, in essence, antiestablishment becomes the establishment with less change than may initially seem necessary. A bully is a bully no matter what uniform it wears.