Though the fire of communism has long died out, Che Guevara remains the potent symbol of youthful rebellion and revolutionary idealism. T-shirts and posters emblazoned with Che’s bearded, bereted, stony-faced visage are flaunted by quixotic college students the world round. The task of demystifying the present-day cult icon has fallen on the shoulders of Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh (“Traffic”), whose previous foray into the biopic, 2000’s “Erin Brockovich,” earned its star Julia Roberts a Best Actress Oscar.

Soderbergh’s Che is an epic, sprawling, ambitious mess of a film and, with a running time of 4 hours and 28 minutes and almost entirely in Spanish, though never boring, is a daunting task. The current incarnation of the movie screened at the 2008 New York Film Festival is broken up into two parts, with a brief intermission in between. (Like “Kill Bill” before it, Che will be broken up into two separate films when it releases wide in the U.S.)

The Argentine doctor-cum-revolutionary hero is played Benicio Del Toro, whose utterly convincing physical and emotionally-charged performance won him the Best Actor award at Cannes. This labor-of-love reunites Soderbergh with his “Traffic” co-conspirator Del Toro, who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the film. Del Toro’s Che is a principled, dogmatic leader and gifted tactician capable of dropping the occasional deadpan witticism, and whose boundless ambition eventually swallows him whole.

In the first half of the film, which will be entitled “The Argentine,” Soderbergh opens in 1955 Mexico City, as a young Guevara is introduced to Cuban exile Fidel Castro (played brilliantly by Mexican actor Demián Bichir) by Castro’s brother Raul (Rodrigo Santoro). The film then jumps back and forth from the Castro/Guevara-led Cuban revolution against military dictator Fulgencio Batista from 1955-1959, and Guevara’s 1964 trip to New York to address the United Nations, advocating revolution throughout Latin America. The latter portion is filmed black-and-white faux-newsreel style, and features snippets of television interviews, portions of his impassioned speeches, and scenes of Che hobnobbing with the New York elite, including Eugene McCarthy, while the former is a war film, whose beautiful, sharp lensing came courtesy of 35mm RED prototype cameras. Like most revolutions, its an underdog story – as Castro, Che, and 80 other insurgents departed Tulpan, Mexico for Cuba on a leaky vessel called The Granma, with only 12 surviving the journey. The group then sets up camp in the Sierra Maestra Mountains, where Che, an exemplary fighter and natural leader, is in charge of recruiting and training Cuban revolutionaries. Despite his debilitating asthma, and being outnumbered 9 to 1, Che leads his group of rebels in a series of guerrilla attacks against various Batista strongholds, culminating in the 1958 battle of Santa Clara. Shot mostly handheld by Soderbergh, the thrilling Santa Clara battle scenes are reminiscent of the Hue battle sequence at the end of Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket,” as Guevara’s band of freedom fighters deal with a city filled with pesky snipers perched on rooftops.

“The Argentine” leaves Che on the road to Havana in January 1959, with Batista’s corrupt regime on the brink of defeat following Che’s daring seizure of Santa Clara. Then the second half of the film, which will be entitled “Guerrilla,” jumps seven years later as Che, at the height of his popularity and wealth, disappeared from Cuba in 1965, and after leading a failed rebellion in the Congo (which is not chronicled in the film), emerges in Bolivia in 1966 to set up a Cuban-funded guerrilla camp deep in the heart of the jungle, and embark on his quest to bring the revolution to all of Latin America. Leading a group of only a few dozen rebels, most of them Cubans, Che is unable to convince any of the local peasants to join the cause, and his insurgents start dropping one-by-one as they either quit, fall ill, or are disposed of by the U.S.-backed Bolivian army. This second film is like the polar opposite of the first, as Che makes a series of tragic missteps, and the rebel forces slowly diminish. Soon, the guerrillas are surrounded and Guevara, shot in the leg, is captured and executed in an abandoned schoolhouse in the small village of La Higuera. The two halves of the film could together be viewed as a diptych sought to symbolize Guevara’s mortality, positing the Argentine as a revolutionary martyr. Unfortunately, there are a series of increasingly diverting cameo appearances by Hollywood stars in “Guerrilla,” most notably Matt Damon, that are wholly unnecessary.

Soderbergh’s Che is a visually-striking ode to guerrilla warfare and revolutionary zeal, but as a character study, his complicated protagonist still remains an enigma. The movie fails to explore Che’s many unusual and striking contradictions, most notably his poetic prowess, extremist views, and the infamous revolutionary tribunals, where he brutally executed hundreds of Cuban dissidents. Instead, we are presented with the uninspiring portrait of a determined rebel with delusions of grandeur who seemed enamored with the guerrilla lifestyle, shunning riches – except his Rolex watch, often seen protruding from his wrist in the film’s second half – in favor of championing coups around the globe; like a more fired-up Chris McCandless, armed with a bolt-action rifle and rebel swagger.