A documentary by Jerry Rothwell. Rating unavailable.

In 1971, Bob Hunter boarded a dilapidated halibut seiner called the Phyllis Cormack, and the world did indeed change. Evolving from his career as an eco-minded mainstream journalist in Vancouver, Hunter was set, along with activists including Paul Watson and Patrick Moore, on preventing nuclear tests on the island of Amchitka.

They were outmanoeuvred by the Nixon administration, but the seismic aftershock of their fool’s mission on the high seas was, as this splendid doc from the U.K. attests, infinitely greater than any bomb.

Greenpeace was born from that caper. With a fluid assemblage of archival footage—lots of hippies, lots of twirling, lots of Kitsilano—and some well-placed music (Can’s “Halleluhwah” makes a particularly energetic appearance), director Jerry Rothwell finds a satisfying route through an unwieldy tale. Hunter himself provides the narration, in unfailingly elegant prose read by another local boy, actor Barry Pepper. He was uncomfortable as a de facto leader, but Hunter couldn’t help being a visionary.

“He could look into the future and imagine things that didn’t yet exist, and he could inspire and empower people to contribute,” says Rex Weyler, one of many Greenpeace founders who show up to pay tribute and set the record straight.

There’s the rub, of course. Whose record, exactly? Personality conflicts began to atomize the crew as they improvised their way through campaigns to save the whales and disrupt the seal cull.

“The greater our influence, the messier and more obstinately human things become,” Hunter wrote, as rifts widened, fatally between conservative-minded Moore and the wild man Watson. It was 1977 when a burned-out Hunter finally resigned from the organization, establishing himself again as an environmentally concerned reporter in Toronto with an early and unwavering bead on climate change.

In the end, it’s hard to fathom the scale of his accomplishments or the mythic breadth of the story, although this film takes a pretty good whack. In 1988, having detonated a number of “mind bombs” in his time (his phrase), Hunter, as the saying goes, died on his feet.

Seen in How to Change the World in his current role as denier of anthropogenic climate change, where does that leave Moore?