This is an excellent film portrayal of the agonies of adjusting to physical disability and dealing with what might loosely be called post-traumatic stress. Tom Cruise is superb in the very demanding role of Ron Kovic.

Oliver Stone’s interest in the social and cultural level of Ron Kovic’s story binds it to a particular moment in history when America was agonizingly reappraising its ideas about war, which means that the dilemmas of patriotism are always central.

And yet the film remains a strong medical-psychological study of post-traumatic identity destroyed and rebuilt, as Ron Kovic slowly and painfully understands his disability, discovers his anger, deals with his guilt, and gropes his way toward wholeness through a prominent role with the growing war-protest movement. In a sense, Ron Kovic was lucky that the revised patriotism was there as a vehicle for his emotional recovery, that both his disillusionment with pro-war patriotism and his disability could actually become sources of cultural validation in that context.

Thus, one question the film implicitly raises for the medical humanities: Are there analogous vehicles for psychic reintegration available to those whose disability is not associated with such a turn of public events, or to Vietnam vets who did not have the chance to rebuild their egos in the heady arena of national politics?