The Baader Meinhof Complex examines 10 years of terrorist arson, bombing, shooting and kidnapping in Germany that ended with the suicide of the main players in October 1977. During this period Gudrun Esslin, Andreas Baader and a Left-wing journalist, Ulrike Meinhof, led the Red Army Faction (RAF) in a murderous campaign of "armed struggle" against the state.

They behaved like teenagers rebelling against authoritarian parents, but with sociopathic menace. Meinhof (Martina Gedeck) is presented here as a depressive. Her marriage collapses early on. We see her, bespectacled and nerdy-looking, banging out radical aphorisms on her typewriter: "A man in uniform is a pig not a man." But writing's not enough for Meinhof. She soon joins Esslin (Johanna Wokalek), in the film as in life a moderately good-looking if angular blonde, and Esslin's boyfriend Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu) in Berlin. They have just set fire to a department store in Frankfurt, a crime for which they are imprisoned.

Somehow she gets Baader and Esslin out of prison and they go on the run to train at a Fatah camp in Jordan. We are only dimly aware that Meinhof has two children until she's made to choose between them and the newly founded RAF. She agrees to give up the children, at which point we see that she must be either heartless or disturbed.

Like all terrorists, the RAF needs money. On their return from Jordan the terrorists commit a series of violent robberies and machine gun murders. Bruno Ganz, so subtle as Hitler in Downfall, brings moral weight to Horst Herold, the chief of police. But I wonder if the casting of Ganz, the actor who broke the taboo on Germans playing Hitler, is supposed to call to mind the fact that the authoritarians against whom the gang were fighting were of the Nazi generation.

By the summer of 1972, Herold has rounded up the gang. For the rest of the movie, Esslin, Baader, Meinhof and other dysfunctional types (many are girls, with names like Astrid, Ilse and Margrit) are locked up, on hunger strike or on trial at the vast white minimalist courthouse at Stuttgart-Stammheim prison. RAF activist Holger Meins is shown starving himself to death. This is then blamed on the authorities and serves as a pretext for more crimes. A judge is shot and killed in cold blood in his home in front of his wife. And a woman is shown climbing into a VW rigged with a bomb for her husband, another public official; we see the car blowing up with her in it.

As we waited for the movie to start, I noticed a lady in front of me say to a younger person, with unmistakeable nostalgia: "It was very exciting at the time." The Baader Meinhof Complex, however, is not exciting. It makes no concessions to ease of viewing. This is cinéma vérité at its most cold and disjointed. The opening scene, for example, shows television footage of the Shah of Iran visiting Berlin and cuts to police, some on horseback, battering student demonstrators in Berlin in 1967 and then shooting one of them dead. Horses' hooves clatter loudly on the soundtrack, there is tear-gas and water cannon and a lot of hand-held camerawork, blood sprayed on the lens. It continues in this vein.

Realism is the aim. Uli Edel, the director, who made the similarly unrelenting Christiane F about a teenage heroin addict, based the exact number of bullets used in the shoot-outs of The Baader Meinhof Complex on the actual police reports. The film eschews linear narrative, preferring minimal exposition and abrupt cutting between scenes.

The writer and producer, Bernd Eichenger, also wrote Downfall, and was criticised by some for humanising the Führer and his associates. I see no evidence in Eichenger's new film that he is trying to encourage empathy with Meinhof, Esslin and Baader. The real gang were sometimes thought of as attractive but in the film the key terrorists, especially Meinhof, come across as psychologically disordered, grubby and plain rather than glamorous. The only exception is the Porsche 911 that we see Baader driving.

The Baader Meinhof Complex is an unstructured two and a half hours of unlikeable characters set against a stark Berlin backdrop. I'm afraid my mind wandered. It frustrated me that Edel and Eichenger chose not to explore why the gang committed such violence. Were the filmmakers afraid they might start liking them? What drives Meinhof to give away her children? Esslin reads Trotsky and quotes Mao Tse-Tung. Baader has anger issues. That's about all we get of their inner world. The film evokes no pathos at their end. Like their other protests, their final martyrdom seems like childish stuff that has gotten out of hand. It is notable how the RAF attracted women to the Kalashnikov - it is young women who take over when the founders are imprisoned. There are always people who say that if only the world was run by women there would be no violence and no wars. Watching this, I doubt it.