History repeats itself as a cartoon in Brett Morgen’s “Chicago 10,” a partially animated, semi-documentary remix of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The film focuses mostly on the eruptions of protest and police violence that led to the infamous federal conspiracy trial of Abbie Hoffman and six of his fellow Yippies a year later.

Mr. Morgen, who previously lionized Hollywood survivor Robert Evans with similar color in 2002’s “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” has taken it upon himself to raise the numerical count to an even 10, accounting for Black Panther leader Bobby Seale and the defense attorneys William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass. That may seem a bit revisionist, but all three ended up serving time after their season before Judge Julius Hoffman, an outrageous 74-year-old crustbucket — or “fascist pig,” in the parlance of Mr. Seale — who often proved as colorful and bizarre as the defendants.

Such dramatic flair is much the force that drives the film, which takes advantage of rotoscoping technology and motion-capture animation to restage the trial, for which actual footage does not exist. Going on the idea that today’s post-college generation should grasp the relevance of this chapter in American history, Mr. Morgen hatched the idea to make “Chicago 10” after an encounter with the team that devised the visual effects in “The Golden Compass” — less so than from watching Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life” and “A Scanner Darkly,” which used similar animation but veered into wiggy, formal experimentation. Mr. Morgen, by contrast, stays inside the lines.

To round out the modern feel, the director also assembled an impressive pool of voices (Mark Ruffalo, Hank Azaria, Nick Nolte, Jeffrey Wright, Dylan Baker, Liev Schreiber and, in a valedictory performance, Roy Scheider as Judge Hoffman) and secured the rights to an iPod-ready playlist of tunes by the likes of Rage Against the Machine, the Beastie Boys and, for some historical relevance, the MC5 — which often turn this montage-laden project into so much glorified MTV fodder.

Maybe that’s the point. Mr. Morgen has said that the movie was inspired by the absence of public outcry when America dispatched troops to Afghanistan and Iraq after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. “Chicago 10” arrives as the Democrats head toward a potentially divisive convention amid debates over the viability of American engagement in Iraq. Few are marching in the streets now, unless they’re parents waiting to buy Hannah Montana concert tickets. But the way the Democratic front-runner, Senator Obama, has energized the under-30 demographic with his vibrant rhetoric and call to generational change suggests that not everyone has been anesthetized by MySpace and “American Idol.”

In the film, the animated sequences, which replay the trial as the historic farce it was rather than the tragedy of Karl Marx’s maxim, feel novel and engaging, with the cartoon format reflecting the zany vaudeville enacted by Hoffman and Rubin, as well the outbursts of Mr. Seale, who was denied use of his own attorney. The trial’s only black defendant, Mr. Seale was eventually bound and gagged in the courtroom to muffle his protests, a scenario that the activist British director Peter Watkins reprised in the kangaroo court scene of his 1971 classic, “Punishment Park,” in which allegorical Yippies become semi-naked prey in a government-managed shooting range.

Instead of dodging bullets, the best-known of the Chicago 10 became celebrities, notably the egocentric Hoffman, whose rock-star posturing forecast his autobiography, “Soon To Be a Major Motion Picture,” and his public life as an underground iconoclast, following a 1973 drug bust that sent him on the lam for seven years.

Aside from some news clips of President Johnson announcing the escalation of troops sent to Vietnam, the film largely avoids material that might frame the events it documents. The crosscutting between the rising tension on the streets as the convention progresses and the antics in the courtroom creates a jarring visual rhythm, but doesn’t add much to the story.

Although the director comes up with some fresh, ironic bits — including housing project kids playing a game of “cops and protesters,” a black woman expressing no sympathy for white college students getting beaten by the police — he’s most successful with the animated segments, which at least contribute something new to the archive. Mr. Morgen has stated that he didn’t want to make “Chicago 10” a Cliff’s Notes version of history, which is good: Anyone using his film as a source for a term paper would probably get a D, because its focus is so narrow and blinkered. But played strictly as entertainment, it’s medium cool.