I caught the second half of The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) this evening. The story of how the young Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara was radicalised by the poverty and deprivation he witnessed during a 1952 motorbike trip through Latin America with his friend, Alberto Granado, was one I was familiar with from a biography I read as a young  student. Guevara was shot when I was ten. When I started secondary school the next year the room where art was taught was plastered with silk-screen images of Che, modelled on Jim Fitzpatrick’s two-tone version of the iconic Alberto Korda photograph. Che images were what would now be called ‘radical chic’ (ironically, given what Guevara thought he was standing for). Yet I wonder how much, if anything, he would mean to a young student today. Probably not a lot. The beauty of Walter Salles biopic is that you don’t have to know ‘what happened next’ in order to enjoy this elegiac journey through the purity and idealism of youth and, coincidentally, a lot of beautiful scenery. For me, the most poignant moment in the film comes at the end when the real Alberto Granado, by then 82, is filmed gazing out and, quite clearly, remembering. Granado died in March this year, a few months shy of his ninetieth birthday.