The studio’s insurer refused to cover Courtney Love. That left director Miloš Forman, producers Janet Yang and Oliver Stone, Woody Harrelson, and Love herself to share the cost of a $750,000 insurance policy. Love submitted to supervised drug testing throughout the shoot and passed every test. It’s an unlikely production anecdote for a movie about a man who made a career of making other people uncomfortable, but it also helps explain why Love’s performance is such a revelation. In The People vs. Larry Flynt, the woman everybody was nervous about hiring turns out to be indispensable.

Larry Flynt (Harrelson, Natural Born Killers) begins as a Kentucky boy selling moonshine and grows into the proprietor of a string of Cincinnati strip clubs. His brother Jimmy, played by Harrelson’s actual brother Brett, is the more levelheaded half of the operation. Hoping to drum up business, Larry starts printing a little newsletter for the clubs. That newsletter becomes Hustler, a magazine determined to go further than Playboy in every possible direction. The more outrageous the publication becomes, the more copies it sells. Larry meets dancer Althea Leasure (Love, of the band Hole), and their unlikely partnership turns into a love affair and marriage. If Larry supplies the nerve and appetite for confrontation, Althea brings an understanding of him that almost nobody else can manage.

The magazine soon puts Larry in the crosshairs of prosecutors, religious campaigners, and anyone who believes decency ought to come with legal enforcement. Among the people determined to stop him is Charles Keating (James Cromwell, Babe). Alan Isaacman (Edward Norton, Primal Fear), a young attorney with a considerably calmer disposition than his client, takes on the increasingly difficult job of keeping Flynt out of prison. The courtroom appearances become a circus, frequently because Larry can’t resist making himself the main attraction. Even after an assassination attempt leaves him using a wheelchair, he refuses to become more agreeable. His running battle with televangelist Jerry Falwell eventually turns a crude parody into a major First Amendment case. Flynt’s argument is simple enough: the Constitution doesn’t stop protecting speech just because the person speaking happens to be obnoxious.

Forman understood that sort of troublemaker. The director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus had a gift for finding the humanity in people who behaved as though the rest of society existed to annoy them. Screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who also wrote Ed Wood and Big Eyes, never pretend Flynt is some misunderstood saint. He’s vulgar, vain, impulsive, and often a spectacular pain to the people trying to help him. Harrelson gives him a mischievous streak that keeps the movie lively, even when Larry’s behavior deserves nothing but a headache. Norton is terrific as the lawyer who learns to manage his client’s antics without losing sight of the legal principle at stake. The real Flynt even appears as a judge, an inspired little piece of casting for a man who spent so much of his life facing one.

Love, however, gives the film its emotional center. Her Althea is funny, sharp, affectionate, and entirely capable of giving Larry as much trouble as he gives the world. As their lives become more difficult and her health deteriorates, the movie briefly escapes the courthouse and becomes a surprisingly affecting portrait of two people who understand each other better than anyone else ever will. It’s also where Forman’s approach is most complicated. The film argues persuasively for Flynt’s freedom to publish while spending comparatively little time considering the women whose bodies made his fortune. Those are two different questions, and the movie is much more interested in answering one than the other.

Released in 1996, the film earned Harrelson an Oscar nomination and won major awards even as its North American box office stopped around $20 million. Thirty years later, the legal argument remains as relevant as ever. You don’t have to admire Flynt, or particularly want to spend an evening with him, to understand why the government shouldn’t get to decide which offensive people are allowed to speak. Forman makes that distinction without pretending his leading man is pleasant company. The First Amendment has rarely had a sleazier salesman, and that’s rather the point.