'Political Dr. Seuss' is all reason, no rhyme

Following the A&E "Biography" template, the film trails its subject from youth in Springfield, where he came from a family of German-American brewers, to Dartmouth College, where Geisel partied, wrote for the college humor magazine, and discovered, as he put it later, that "words and pictures together might make a more interesting progeny than either parent."

For these sequences, Lamothe uses mostly black-and-white footage of 1920s student life and old-timey jazz on the soundtrack; we get city-crowd montages when Geisel journeys to New York to make it as an illustrator. You need a deft hand to make this sort of dive into the stock-film bin inspiring, and the filmmaker doesn't have it. Similarly, the use of scenes from dated kiddie-animation versions of Seuss classics from the 1970s and '80s feels like padding. But you works with what you gots.

The meat of "The Political Dr. Seuss" comes during the World War II era, when Geisel -- by then a successful commercial illustrator and children's book author who had already taken on his famous pen name -- was moved by outrage at American isolationism to start drawing political cartoons. He was hired by "PM," the now-forgotten liberal daily newspaper, and cranked out 400 cartoons in two years. They are, in the words of one interviewee, "brash, often schoolboyish, and angry."

Hitler and Mussolini came in for regular bashing, as did US fascists and "America First"-ers; you get a sense of Seuss's gleeful unsubtlety in a cartoon of Charles Lindbergh wearing a gas mask while he shovels glop from a wagon labeled "Nazi Anti-Semite Stink Wagon." He also came down hard on the Japanese with breathtaking buck-toothed racism, and it's amusing to watch Lamothe's film twist itself into PC pretzels to address this.