Ken Kesey's delirious novel plus Paul Newman's butch yet sensitive filmmaking equals a paean to tough individualism worthy of the ancient Greeks. The Stamper clan, fiercely loyal to themselves and fiercely suspicious of outsiders (including a long-lost "mommy- sissypants" Stamper brother), are Oregon loggers, as tough and knotty as the forests they cut down. They scrap with the unions, they scrap with the townspeople, and they scrap with each other in epic, grinding battles. (Henry Fonda as the wry, nail-spitting Stamper patriarch is awe-inspiring.) The film's final shot, of Newman casually opening a beer on a tugboat after lashing a severed arm to the mainmast, its stiff little fingers flipping off the entire town, is the finest fuck you/beau geste in film, literature, or life. Ain't that America? It gets me every time. (Grand Illusion, 1403 NE 50th St, 523-3935. 8 pm, $8.)