Actors: Val Kilmer, Meg Ryan, Kyle MacLachlan, Frank Whaley, Kevin Dillon Directors: Oliver Stone Writers: Oliver Stone, Randall Jahnson Producers: A. Kitman Ho, Bill Graham, Brian Grazer, Catherine Meyers, Clayton Townsend. Oliver Stone's film about the sixties rock group focusses on Jim Morrison, the Doors' lead singer and main songwriter, who died in 1971, at the age of twenty-seven. Morrison (played by Val Kilmer) presented himself as a combination of shaman and poète maudit, and he was a star in life and a legend in death because he made the physical, intellectual, and spiritual excesses of the counterculture sexy. The movie is pure exploitation-an extended, self-important freakout. Stone reduces the richly contradictory experience of that period to the myth of Morrison, and, in the process, reduces Morrison and the Doors as well: the movie restricts the viewer's freedom to imagine the sixties culture as anything but a movement with a single voice, or to imagine the Doors as anything but a metaphor. (Kilmer is physically convincing as Morrison, but his performance can be only an impersonation: what the script-by Stone and J. Randal Johnson-gives him to play is the icon, not the man.) For a while, the obviousness and flat-out vulgarity are sort of entertaining, and it might be possible to enjoy the movie as a camp classic if you could ignore the mean-spiritedness that keeps breaking through-the fundamental hostility Stone seems to feel toward his subjects. He wants to turn the audience (and himself) on, but the movie's bad faith and tabloidlike sensibility leave us exhausted and depressed; we feel like voyeurs of our own memories. Also with Meg Ryan, Kathleen Quinlan, and Michael Wincott; the other Doors are played by Kyle MacLachlan, Frank Whaley, and Kevin Dillon. -Terrence Rafferty Tape in very good condition.