The makers of a new biopic of the late comedian Bill Hicks have come up with an unusual and ingenious way of depicting his early life, in the absence of any live footage. Rather than use talking heads, they've cleverly animated scenes from his early life around two-dimensional photographs of him – which is sort of like standing a cardboard cut-out at a bar, I fancy, and buying it a drink.

This seems, quietly if perhaps inadvertently, to make a point. Hicks's reputation is now so fixed, so singular, and – among the more rabid of his many fans – so two-dimensional that, a decade and a half on from his death at the age of 33, he's already halfway to being a cardboard cut-out – or a plaster saint, at the very latest.

There is no comic in history held in quite the same regard as Hicks. Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor come closest, but neither enjoys the status Hicks does. Of an iconoclast, Hicks's fans have made an icon. He is described not in the sort of terms you typically hear used for standup comics, but in the vocabulary of naked religious devotion. If you Google "Bill Hicks" and "prophet", you get 47,000-odd hits.

In Garth Ennis's comic-book series Preacher, Hicks appears in flashback. Sitting beside Ennis's hero at the bar after a gig, Hicks notices Jesse Custer's dog-collar and says: "Holy shit – you're a preacher!" Custer replies, with the soppy face of every Hicks fanboy: "I guess that makes two of us."

In 2004, the Labour MP Stephen Pound put down an early day motion asking the house to recognise the 10th anniversary of Hicks's death, describing him as an "unflinching and painfully honest political philosopher". Hicks was great, I agree – but isn't it time we got a sense of perspective?

They say Hicks fearlessly told the truth to The Man. And I suppose he did, if by The Man, you mean liberal comedy club audiences. But he wasn't political in a particularly complicated or dangerous way. He had a very good line in sarcasm about war and the arms industry; he was a libertarian on drugs; he was anticapitalist in a T-shirt-slogan sort of way; and he was a fine advert for the sacred right to talk dirty in public.

Not everything Hicks did was nice or even consistent. He mocked the stupid and/or ill-educated – waffle waitresses, rednecks, Republican presidents – and he gave succour to the tobacco and pornography industries. Some also found him misogynistic, though I come down on the side of thinking his porn-loving, priapic alter-ego Goat Boy ("Goat Boy likes young girls . . . 16 years old . . . heh heh heh") essentially self-mocking.

Hicks's worldview – we are all energy; money and status are meaningless distractions; authenticity of feeling is paramount; embrace love, not fear – basically made him a hippy disguised as a punk. There was a faint hint of rightwing anarchism about him, too: a sense that big business, the military, the federal government and New Kids on the Block were all engaged in a malevolent conspiracy.

But Hicks didn't live in a fascist regime any more than the Sex Pistols did when they sang God Save the Queen – and he wasn't saying the unsayable. Preferring rock music to Michael Bolton and Rick Astley is quite proper, but it isn't a revolutionary statement. Getting a routine censored from the David Letterman show doesn't put you up there with Solzhenitsyn and Aung San Suu Kyi.

Hicks's politics were among the least interesting things about him. What was great him was that he was really funny – a smart, aggressive comedian with a humane outlook and a killer technique. But is it healthy when a comic is revered not for being funny, but for being righteous? Hicks had a routine to counter that complaint. When somebody reproached him that they didn't come to comedy shows to think, he responded: "Where do you go to think? I'll meet you there."

The problem is that like many charismatic people whose basic manifesto is: "Use your brains! Think for yourselves!", he has acquired a whole bunch of fans whose idea of thinking for themselves is to quote Bill Hicks. I have high hopes that the cardboard cut-outs in this new biopic will help restore Hicks to three dimensions.