The film asks its audience to hold both of these truths simultaneously: that Flynt was a pornographer who made a great deal of money from material that many people found genuinely degrading, and that the legal principle his battles established — that government cannot suppress speech on the grounds of offensiveness alone — is one of the most important protections in American constitutional law. Harrelson’s performance was the instrument through which the film made this argument: by making Flynt fully human and therefore fully complicated, it prevented the film from being either a simple defense of pornography or a simple demonstration of the value of free speech. It was a character study, and the character was worth studying.
The Oscar nomination for Best Actor placed him in the conversation about the most significant performances of that year, and it marked the first time the Academy had recognized him for something that was not, by any definition, commercial entertainment. The nomination was for a performance that required moral complexity to be inhabited rather than performed — that required him to make Flynt sympathetic without pretending Flynt was admirable, and to make him flawed without making him contemptible. The specific tonal management that the performance required is the hardest kind of acting work there is, and the nomination acknowledged that he had done it.
He did not win. The Best Actor award that year went to Geoffrey Rush for Shine. But the nomination established a new frame for understanding his career: not as the good-natured Midwesterner from Cheers who had made an interesting transition to edgy film work, but as an actor with the full range of dramatic capacity that Academy recognition implies.