''Up against the wall, mothers!'' screams a character during The '60s, and the deletion of the expletive at the end of that countercultural rallying cry is only the most ridiculous sin against accuracy committed by this two-part TV movie. It focuses on ripe cliches of the era: the Vietnam vet (Jerry O'Connell); the angry dad (Life Goes On's Bill Smitrovich, who yells at his peacenik son, ''Is that why I'm paying your tuition?''); and the hippie (Julia Stiles, who, despite banal lines, manages to give the only fully formed performance here).
The '60s' script by Bill Couturie, Robert Greenfield, and Jeffrey Fiskin is most superficial with its black protagonists. These include Charles S. Dutton as a Martin Luther King-inspired protester whose killing by police radicalizes his son into joining the Black Panthers, who are led by In Living Color's David Alan Grier. He plays a Fred Hampton so genially bland, the philosophical rift between King and the Panthers seems inconsequential. Kids, it wasn't.
The '60s flattens everything out into an everybody-had-their-flaws pageant (and tacks a crummy new recording of Bob Dylan's ''Chimes of Freedom'' co-sung with Joan Osborne onto its soundtrack). It wants to summon up the chaos and defiance of the period but instead turns it into one long Dateline NBC ''dramatization.'' D
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