Some Straight Talk About the Twist : Movies: Ron Mann’s film chronicles a moment in cultural history--when America went from ‘squareness’ to ‘awareness.’

Ron Mann is on a mission to make popular culture a part of traditional history, and with the help of Hank Ballard, Chubby Checker and some aging stars from “American Bandstand,” he just might have another victory on his hands.

Mann, a Canadian filmmaker with critically acclaimed documentaries on avant-garde jazz, performance poetry and comic books under his belt, has turned the volume up a few notches on his fourth film, “Twist,” the dance he chronicles as a watershed moment in American cultural history.

The 78-minute documentary features classic footage from performers like Joey Dee and the Starlighters (“The Peppermint Twist”) and the Marvelettes (“Twistin’ Postman”), interviews with famed R&B; choreographer Cholly Atkins, “Bandstand” dancers, and the man who taught the public the world’s easiest dance, Chubby Checker.

“Twist” opened last weekend in Los Angeles and New York to favorable reviews, garnering special nods for the energetic music and dance sequences that actually brought audiences at this year’s Sundance Film Festival to their feet.

Yet Mann, the 35-year-old filmmaker who was just a tot when the Twist took America by storm, insists he made “Twist” to educate as much as to excite.

“I am, at heart, a cultural historian,” he said in an interview last week. “I’m making movies to reclaim our history.”

With wire-rimmed glasses, a mane of wild, graying hair and an academic’s background in political philosophy, Mann could easily pass for a post-hippie professor. Yet the gleam in his eyes as he talks of Ballard, his latest hero, shows a layman’s love for the free spirit of rock ‘n’ roll.

“I’m filming for the next generation, because we have no record of these very important artists,” he added. “I’m looking for something that’s in between the dials--what we’re not getting on television and what we’re not getting in mainstream cinema.”

Mann worked with producer-director Ivan Reitman in the mid-’80s on projects like “Legal Eagles.” While his documentaries may never play to “Jurassic Park” numbers, he knows his work does not go unnoticed:

“There is an audience for this,” he said. “I’m not making these movies for myself.”

What viewers will get from “Twist” is a thoughtful examination of how a dance revolution touched off the evolution in society from the rigid Eisenhower Administration to a looser Kennedy era, how pulling dancers apart from each other and allowing them to swing their hips literally changed the way people lived. To extend the political metaphor, he argues that the Twist “liberated” and “democratized” dance.

“It was known as a twisted age,” explained the director. “I saw the film as a move from the 1950s to the 1960s, how we moved from what I call ‘squareness’ to ‘awareness.’ ”

Just as much questioning student as knowing instructor, Mann the filmmaker is obsessive about proving his points. In “Twist” he does it by steering his audience on a trip down an oft-traveled memory lane, but with a few new stops.

We learn that it was Ballard, not Chubby Checker, who wrote the song that set teen-agers’ hips in motion in 1958. Ballard and the Midnighters, known for the racy “Work With Me Annie,” were considered too hot for Dick Clark’s television crowd, so a kinder, gentler Checker was brought in to re-record the song.

But don’t expect Ballard to be bitter. “I gave the world the biggest dance craze ever,” he says in the film. “If Chubby hadn’t recorded it, it wouldn’t have been as big as it was.”

Big? Try huge. Try the most successful single in history, the only record to go to No. 1 twice in different years (1960 and 1962). And all that’s before it became vogue again in 1988 with the Fat Boys’ rap version.

“I really wanted people to know Hank Ballard and his story,” Mann said. “But I also wanted people to know how the dance was sold, how the industry sells the product.”

Yet selling his own product in “Twist” was no easy task.

Mann grins when recalling his days in Hollywood, which brought him none of the financial headaches that a documentary project like “Twist” did. He now works himself in and out of debt on a film-by-film basis, as evidenced by the absence of certain twist-era songs--like Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”--from the movie due to his limited budget.

He jokes that the film took three days to film and three years to edit. But such meticulous efforts have come to be expected from the filmmaker, whose “Comic Book Confidential” (1988), “Poetry in Motion” (1982) and “Imagine the Sound” (1981) delved into equally rocky ground. In November Mann will finish “Dream Tower,” a documentary about Rochdale College in Toronto, a Canadian version of the Haight Asbury district. Then he’ll tackle the history of radio in “Sparks.”

For now, he’s trying to catch his breath in time to ride even the smallest of waves with “Twist.”

Whether baby boomers will take their children to the movie remains to be seen, but Mann hopes the film serves as a generational link for the adults who remember the Twist and the young people living in the aftermath.

“I intended it for kids . . . so when they see Hammer, when they see Madonna and MTV they know where (the dances) come from.

“It comes from Cholly Atkins, who was the link between jazz and rock ‘n’ roll dance. If it wasn’t for Cholly Atkins, we’d all still be doing the two-step. And if it wasn’t for Hank Ballard, rock ‘n’ roll would be completely different.”