If you were around in the '60s-early '70s, you knew that it was a time when movies mattered - more than that, certain movies mattered like crazy, if you were young, and whether you lived in New York or London or Prague. That is to say, certain movies became anthemic, generational totems: Easy Rider (1969) in the US, I Am Twenty (1965) in Russia, Velvet Hustler (1967) in Japan, any of a dozen '60s Godard movies in France. England's "swinging" urban culture of the time was particularly movie crazy and Brit kids embraced scads of homegrown films as being life-or-death expressions of the "Way We Are Now." But Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell's Performance (1970) might be the quintessential movie of the English '60s moment.

Happily, the legend of such films comes along with it, ready for us to savor as a part of its context; maybe it's not as good as being a sex-crazed, freedom-drunk rock-n-roll co-ed thumbing our nose at the older generation during the Harold Wilson era, and falling into the post-Mod hijinks of Performance for the first time, but the time travel the film provides is compensation enough. It starts outrageously enough, with a nudity-packed intro to our protagonist Chas (James Fox), a violent, bling-devoted London gangster in the middle of a hedonistic bedroom encounter; the sex is rough, the jewelry is gold, the soundtrack is unstable (toggling from cool music to ominous drone effects).

Afterwards, his back is covered in scratches, his exercise regimen is uninterrupted and we realize the girl is nothing more than a casual hook-up. From there, the film sketches Chas' professional situation in classic New Wave-esque jump cuts and surreal leaps, making it clear to us that Chas' outfit is busy putting the squeeze on a corrupt banker who owes them while the old guy is on trial for fraud (in which banking malfeasance is happily equated to mobster tactics, and the jury is shown watching a S/M stag loop). Restless but dedicated to his work, Chas goes all in torturing the man's staff and raining acid on the defense lawyer's Rolls Royce, before going too far and paying a threatening visit to an old friend, whose betting shop Chas' boss wants to take over. Things get out of hand and before Chas knows it, amidst a sound beating by a trio of angry goons, he retaliates and leaves a body behind.

Escaping both the law and his own ass-covering boss's henchmen, Chas colors his hair and searches for a place to lay low--and finds it, by accident-- in the basement apartment of a reclusive rock star, Turner (Mick Jagger). Then Roeg and Cammell's movie slows down and starts turning the worm: Turner and his two free-loving consorts (sultry Anita Pallenberg and boyish Michele Breton) are hedonists par excellence, living a shuttered, pillow-bedecked, incense-odored head-trip existence of unremitting sex and drugs. Worlds collide, as they say, as Chas is slowly transformed into a meta-Turner, and almost vice-versa, while the real world and its vicious capitalist priorities vanishes, replaced by a sense of fluid identities and anything-goes hippiedom.

For that, it's still a film of glum, brooding, decidedly unfrivolous action; Turner's reclusiveness is never explained, and Jagger's simulacra of himself never has any fun. "Nothing is true, everything is permitted," as someone quotes William S. Burroughs (by way of Vladimir Bartol), and that stakeless anomie permeates the movie. (Borges is also referenced amply.) Cast a cold eye on Performance and it becomes a very cynical vision of the counter-culture ethos, with the four characters trapped as though in a controlled-substance-saturated Beckett or Sartre play, or in a rather luxurious but pointless circle of Purgatory.

Roeg and Cammell's movie - the first for each - can be both adored for its time-capsule sensibilities and mocked for its pretensions. For one thing, the movie suspends all judgment on virtually all behavior - even the moment when Pallenberg injects heroin into her bare butt cheek, as Jagger in the background mutters something about "shouldn't do that stuff so much," is seen as consequence-free. (Heroin is never mentioned again, and Pallenberg remains the most sensible adult in the house. Meanwhile, Pallenberg has admitted since that the hit was real.) It's strange, watching a film in which conventional moral attitudes are suspended so entirely, and it's that strangeness, which may not have seemed so strange in London in 1970 if you were high and/or in revolt against your parents, that quite obviously made the film a hit.

Mushrooms, guns, candles, bathtub threesomes, Eastern music, cross-gender dress-up--the film itself becomes a druggy dorm party bordering on the dangerous. (In his transformation, Fox ends up looking like Captain Jack Sparrow in a Jim Morrison wig.) Roeg started as a celebrated cinematographer, and Cammell as a painter-Lothario turned screenwriter and pal of Jagger and avant-gardist Kenneth Anger. They shared a taste for fracturing social norms and the vogue of movies seemingly aware of their own unstable movieness. Certainly, the films they made separately after Performance - Roeg's career thrived in a wacky, freeform way into the new century, while Cammell's is limited to a handful of bizarre features and unfinished projects - tended toward disjunctions, time leaps, and identity morphing, long after this kind of meta-movie toolbox had been the fashion.

The movie almost missed its moment. It had been shot in 1968, but the casual nudity and sex fomented dissent from the film lab to the editing suite to the offices of Warner Bros., and it took three edits to get it into a form that everyone decided was releasable. The mind boggles as to what was left on the cutting room floor, but as it is, Roeg and Cammell's film stands as pop culture history. You don't stand a chance at understanding that moment in history, particularly British history, without seeing it.

By Michael Atkinson