When Ernesto “Che” Guevara climbed aboard his friend’s rickety Norton 500 motorbike for an eight-month road trip in January 1952, the 23-year-old Argentine medical student could not have anticipated the historic life that lay before him. The speeches. The revolutions. The armies of bourgeois American college students who would someday dribble beer on T-shirts bearing his likeness.

In the Sundance-anointed “The Motorcycle Diaries,” director Walter Salles (“Central Station”) reveals the man behind the trendy socialist icon. Burning with idealism, compassion and the brio of youth, it’s a fascinating portrait of one man’s rise to consciousness and a stirring testament to the transformative, soul-enriching power of travel.

Guevara — played with captivating intensity by Mexican actor Gael García Bernal (“Y Tu Mamá También”) — and his picaresque travel companion, 29-year-old chemist Alberto Granado (Rodrigo De la Serna), do not see themselves as revolutionaries when they set off on a mishap-plagued 8,000-mile road trip on Granado’s motorcycle, nicknamed “La Poderosa” (“The Mighty One”).

Half-jokingly, Granado announces his intention to “get laid in every country in South America.” These are regular guys; well-educated, introspective, but essentially in it for the kicks.
Some of their adventures have a bawdy charm that suggests a Latin version of “Animal House.” With La Poderosa in the shop, Guevara cuckolds a drunk car mechanic (or tries to, anyway) and finagles beers and empanadas from a pair of accommodating sisters in Chile. Later, Granado runs the blackjack table and puts the moves on a Peruvian riverboat prostitute.

Smoothly, director Salles shifts gear, fashioning scenarios that expose Guevara and Granado to the worst of human exploitation and misery, including the film’s powerfully moving denouement at a leper colony straddling the Amazon River.

Gradually, Che’s already sympathetic views toward the poor are altered and fine-tuned. Screenwriter Jose Rivera based the script on independent memoirs written by the men years after their journey.

Salles, employing the keen eye of cinematographer Eric Gautier (“Pola X”), captures rural South America in all its rugged, wide-open majesty. Skipping past these landscapes and human topographies at half-throttle, Salles creates a serene statement about friendship and destiny — one, it should be added, that is blessedly free of heavy-handed political dogma.
By limiting the biographical scope of his movie, Salles shows us Guevara in arguably his purist state — pre-political, plain-spoken, uncorrupted by the vanities of power. When Guevara, incensed by the symbolic quarantine of patients at the leper colony, swims across the Amazon to be with his leprified mates, we see a man who would literally risk life and limb to bridge the gulf of inequality.

When he emerges from the water, shivering and wet, to the cheers of the downtrodden, we witness something even more uncanny: the birth of a leader.