Operation Remission

Longtime political activist Johnson ( Killing the Blues ) evokes the lost idealism of the 1960s and assembles a cast of believable, slightly offbeat characters to pull a caper that will wake up the Establishment. Wendell Jacobsen, known as Jake, has only months to live due to leukemia probably caused by his exposure to atomic radiation while serving in the army at Los Alamos during the '50s. Traveling in his 1953 Chevy pickup with his grown son Eric, Jake encounters an old friend, once a teenage radical media star named Gillie Townsend, now a dealer of guns and drugs in the Southwest going by the name of Gil Torres. After an exchange of stoned, funny verbal riffs, Gil comes up with a plan to hijack some plutonium and introduce a low-level dose of it into the U.S. Capitol during the State of the Union address. Fast and suspenseful action peters out in an oddly minor-key ending, but those with a weakness for '60s nostalgia will appreciate Johnson's tribute to ``that very special time, when everything necessary to make life truly worth living had appeared to be almost within everybody's grasp.'' (Jan.)