Molly Ivins in Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins (Magnolia Pictures)

If you don’t know the late columnist’s work, the sassy title of the author’s 1991 best seller Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She? tells you a lot. Molly Ivins delighted in twitting the powerful as a proud liberal in blood-red Texas. In the now-vaporized media landscape of the 1980s and 1990s, her tart, incisive column in more than 400 daily newspapers sparked outrage and attracted loyal followers, even among Ivins’s political enemies. Janice Engel’s energizing documentary plays up the happy-warrior side of Ivins’s life and output while allowing for glimpses of the darkness that underscored them both.

Standing more than six feet tall by age 12, Ivins seems to have decided that standing out gave her a license to go for broke. After fleeing her affluent Houston family, she battled police in civil rights demonstrations, brazed trails as a woman reporter, and soon made her mark in the 1970s with ornery challenges to Texas’s entrenched racism and injustice. The filmmakers play up Ivins’s origins with banjo music and colorful western graphics, although her good-ole-girl persona can feel like a bit of a shtick—Ivins got ample exposure to liberal ideas with stints in Paris, New York City, and Smith College. Nevertheless, her plainspoken zingers and sharp insights delighted readers. Editors, though, did not always appreciate her broad, vernacular voice. Ivins drolly recalls when the New York Times substituted the prim phrase “protuberant abdomen” for her original wording, “beer gut that belonged in the Smithsonian.”

Raise Hell features many of Ivins’s TV appearances—thank God for C-SPAN, incidentally my first employer out of college—and her dry salvoes have aged well. Ivins used her journalistic platform to stand up for the underdog and the American middle class. At a time when liberal social critiques can seem reduced to “mean people suck” and Twitter seethes with tit-for-tat vitriol, Ivins’s barbed but humorous putdowns of the scolds, hypocrites, and dimwits who populate public life ring with wit and sincerity and affection for her fellow flawed human beings. Her faith in the American people to (eventually) do the right thing was unshakeable. Rachel Maddow, one of the documentary’s liberal talking heads, says that Ivins’s unique talent was to disarm evildoers with a laugh.

Except toward the end, Ivins wasn’t doing much laughing. Her critiques of foes grew harsher. Friends talk openly about her struggles with alcohol, which memorably blew up when a three-sheets-to-the wind Ivins lit into Nancy Pelosi before a room full of cringing onlookers. Cancer stalked the writer in her last few years until her death in 2007. Characteristically, she faced it with brass and irony, delivering speeches with a chemotherapy-bald head.

But what truly may have let misery in for Ivins was the dark rightward drift of American politics. An exhausted and possibly hungover Ivins faces the camera and flatly declares that she refuses to vote in an upcoming presidential election. “I don’t want something on the ballot that says ‘none of the above.’ I want something that says ‘I want to vomit.’” This is in 1996, mind you, the heyday of the supposedly enlightened Clinton years.

Bill Clinton’s welfare reform struck Ivins as a betrayal, and worse was yet to come. Ivins tried to warn America about the dangers of a George W. Bush presidency and the debacle that would follow from the invasion of Iraq. She railed against rollbacks of First Amendment rights and foresaw the pernicious effect of corporate money in our political system. Not enough people listened. Although her admirers never tired of praising her warmth and sass, Ivins ended up something of a prophet without honor in the last few years of her life, something that the documentarydoesn’t really come to terms with. If a figure this down-to-earth, generous, and believable can’t persuade Americans that liberalism is a viable path, what hope is there for liberalism?

Some reviewers of the film breezily claim that if Ivins were alive today, she’d have a high old time mocking our current president and eviscerating contemporary outrages. I disagree. I think the 2019 scene would disgust Ivins and break her heart. Here’s hoping she rests at ease somewhere, with a country song on her stereo and a choice, naughty quip on her lips.