Metacritic reviews

The director, Joseph Lovett, wants us to ask if there's such a thing as too much freedom, and he has the sobriety to say yes -- and no.

Lovett's film is a finely balanced and loving work of history, which never tries to sugarcoat elements of the explosion of gay sexuality three decades ago that may seem excessive or disturbing to some contemporary viewers.

Some four decades after the birth of the gay-rights movement, the excess and sexual abandon of gay life in the '70s seems more an aberration than an accurate picture of out-and-about gay life at the end of the 20th century.

Lively, impassioned, well-structured documentary.

Magnificent photographs, archival news footage, and location-shot porn add texture and immediacy to Joseph Lovett's fascinating memoir of the sexually explosive 12-year period (1969-1981).

Within that narrow framework, the film is quite successful, using archival photographs, clips from pornographic films and television commercials, and interviews to evoke the period between June 1969, when the Stonewall riots brought homosexuality out of the shadows, to June 1981, when the AIDS epidemic began.

It's fair to assume that most viewers likely to see the film, whose title is the very definition of truth in advertising, already own the knowledge being sold.

Lovett's history is heavy on hedonism, but he does deliver a succinct perspective on this celebratory era - between the sad bookends of repression and loss.

The conclusion is that in this bare-chested band of brothers, what really matters is camaraderie. "Having friends," remembers one guy, "that was the best part." As he says this, the décor behind him features a pair of handcuffs.

Lightly entertaining, but--not unlike the cheap action it chronicles--leaves one wanting something much more substantial.