Revolution is all about style.

That’s one of the lessons to be gleaned from The Baader Meinhof Complex, an excellent new film by German director Uli Edel playing this week at Cornell Cinema. In a humane and haunting manner, the movie traces the rise and fall of the Red Army Faction, which for much of the late ’60s and ’70s sought to violently enact a Marxist awakening in West Germany. Against a finely orchestrated shower of bullets and bombs, the urgency, hope and hypocrisy of those years is played out.

The young, earnest followers of the RAF (which came to be known by the names of its two most prominent leaders, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof) are not painted here as the bloodthirsty terrorists one might expect. Instead, Edel does a masterful job of demonstrating how a motley group of intellectuals, outcasts and thugs could capture the imagination of a movement (one in four young Germans sympathized with the RAF, as we are reminded early in the film) even while blowing up innocents and executing judges — and how they lost that support in their listless slide toward nihilistic delusion.

Our protagonist for the first act of the movie is Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck), a liberal columnist who gradually abandons her comfortable bourgeois existence (large home, happy children, television appearances) and joins the ranks of the anarcho-communist student movement. Edel gives us visceral glimpses of what made these young activists churn: the brutal suppression of protests against the Shah’s 1967 visit to Berlin; the CIA’s murder of Che Guevara; the endless brutality of Vietnam, to name a few. Primed by these visions of imperialist aggression and domestic suppression, we can’t help but identify with the ideological motivations of the RAF’s supporters.

But politics play only a small part in the psychology of these young murderers. As the mother of Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) puts it, violent actions bestow on these childish revolutionaries “a state of almost euphoric self-realization”; the allure of the rebel’s pose, the power of intimidation, the feeling of solidarity — these are the real substance of the RAF’s allure, and the sexiness and style of the film’s first half — with its fast cars, big guns and naked women — recreate this attraction.

The Baader Meinhof Complex, however, is anything but shy about the narrow-minded rage that characterizes its protagonists. Meinhof is the paradigmatic case: as ever-greater violence fails to achieve any of her group’s stated goals, the logic of Ulrike’s polemics becomes increasingly convoluted. What were once defined as acts of “solidarity” are now acts of “self-defense,” and the enemy list expands from police to judges to reporters. Internationally-minded activists become self-involved criminals, and the whole world becomes a venue for their rampage.

And yet, even as they are undone by indoctrination and their own irreversible crimes, the iconoclasts of the Baader-Meinhof group betray a levity (and insincerity) behind their earnestness. They race cars at the dead of night and shoot street signs; training in the desert with the PLO, they strip naked and espouse the merits of sexual liberation (“Fucking and shooting are the same!”). When Baader and a compatriot are trapped in a shoot-out with the police — as an ominous voice, stand-in for the sane and sober citizenry whom the RAF have long since abandoned, asks over a loudspeaker, “What are you doing? How will you get out of this situation?” — they giggle and light fresh cigarettes. The revolution is a party — but those not invited shall be killed.

The screenplay (written by Edel and Bern Eichinger and based on a book by Stefan Aust) is, by and large, nuanced, and avoids easy characterizations. A rare misstep is the device of the counterterrorism official Horst Herold (Bruno Ganz), who, in a series of speeches interspersed throughout the choreographed action sequences, pontificates on the motivations and perseverance of the RAF. Such political didacticism is scare in the film, and it does nothing to further the otherwise dispassionate portrayal of the period.

More so than any film in recent memory, The Baader Meinhof Complex, with its schizophrenic movements between violence and conversation, between anger and levity, exposes the way in which idealists become radicalized past the point of humanity. Baader notes at one point that “urban guerillas operate in the rift between the state and the masses.” That rift only grew and grew, expanding into an echo chamber where the founders of the RAF (and their followers, and their followers’ followers) became spellbound by their own catchphrases and poses. There is no lesson in this film, no message: only the stark reminder of what can happen when ideas — and infatuations — eclipse morality.