Steve Earle and Sheryl Crow cover the song here, and perhaps director Robert Greenwald thought that the new performance would inch the song away from cinematic cliché. If anyone can get away with singing lines like "Our souls've been psychedelicized," and "I might get burned up by the sun," set against knee-jerk snippets of dialogue ("I think we stand for the destruction of property") it's Earle, whose timeworn voice conveys a thick layer of grit with every syllable he utters. The same, alas, cannot be said for Sheryl Crow, whose ridiculous yelping and forced inflections are actually comical. Sadly, this is not a farce.

That's the problem with a lot of the "Steal This Movie" soundtrack, which pairs contemporary musicians with aging classics from Dylan, Country Joe & the Fish and others. Those '60s show horses don't age well, and when they're updated they tend to sound overly earnest and cloying. Bonnie Raitt is a hell of a musician, and a damn fine singer, but she sounds sorely out of her league trying to tweak Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." Joan Osborne and Jackson Browne don't fare much better on "My Back Pages" -- "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." Mary Chapin Carpenter is a hair better on her version of Donovan's "Mellow Yellow," but it's never more than mildly interesting.

Not even the intact period pieces -- Edwin Starr's "War" and Eric Burdon and Billy Preston's "Power to the People" -- can hold this effort together. Two Country Joe & the Fish songs work better, if only because they haven't been so played out; also, there's a feral intensity in hearing Joe McDonald snarl, "Send you back to Texas/Make you work on your ranch," about the then-president, Lyndon B. Johnson.

And then there's Ani DiFranco, who actually pulls off what must have been expected of the entire soundtrack. DiFranco does two songs here, Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" and Phil Ochs' "When I'm Gone." (Ochs himself performs "I Ain't Marching Anymore.") Set over a single, shimmering guitar, DiFranco wraps her voice, at once mellifluous and caustic, around these two old folk standards. Unlike Raitt, unlike Osborne and Browne, DiFranco makes these songs sound fresh and exciting. She gives them new life, a sense of continuity and shared legacy between Abbie Hoffman's heady '60s and today. Dragging herself across "When I'm Gone," it's hard not to get choked up. And when she sings about a sign warning that a swimming hole is "Private Property," she sounds angry and hopeful, bitter and wistful all at once.

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