"If you stay around long enough, you'll eventually become respectable," Jerry Garcia once said, and nobody personifies that quote better than an unlikely rock band from Czechoslovakia: The Plastic People of the Universe. The band formed in 1968 under Soviet rule, heavily influenced by American rock music in general and the Velvet Underground in particular. The story of these real-life Bohemians from Bohemia is a fascinating account of repression, subversion, and rock music as revolutionary force.

After an initial phase of exhuberant experimentation that rivals San Francisco's Acid Tests in pure weirdness, the Plastic People, including guitarist Milan Hlavsa and Vratislav Brabenec (sax), were jailed by the repressive goverment after a sham trial on charges of vulgarity. In the Seventies, after members were released, they were driven to seek out farmhouses in the countryside, including future president Vaclav Havel's barn, where they played secret concerts, always persued by the secret police who blew up or burned down the buildings within minutes after the concerts ended.

When the Plastic People were driven apart in the late Seventies, it was unlikely that they would ever play together again. Yet the film includes footage of a reunion concert at the Prague Castle at Vaclav Havel's invitation -- after years in an underground that even the most subversive American bands cannot begin to imagine, these self-discribed philosophizing alcoholics finally achieved respectability.

The Plastic People of the Universe opens at the Two Boots Theater in New York on January 18. Directed by Jana Chytlova. Featuring Lou Reed, Gary Lucas, Egon Bondy, and Vaclav Havel.