BUENOS AIRES, May 25— Che Guevara is widely remembered today as a revolutionary figure; to some a heroic, Christ-like martyr, to others the embodiment of a failed ideology. To still others, he is just a commercialized emblem on a T-shirt.

But for Latin Americans just now coming of age, yet another image of Che is starting to emerge: the romantic and tragic young adventurer who has as much in common with Jack Kerouac or James Dean as with Fidel Castro.

The phenomenon began a decade ago with the publication of his long-suppressed memoir known in English as ''The Motorcycle Diaries,'' which has become a cult favorite among Latin American college students and young intellectuals. But it is being catapulted ahead now by the release this month of a Latin American-made film version of the book, enthusiastically received both in the region and last week at Cannes.

Predictably, those on the traditional left in Cuba and elsewhere in the region, who view themselves as the guardians of Che's legacy, have not exactly welcomed this development. But others argue that it reflects not only the malleability of Che's own character and experience but also the need of each generation to fashion an image of Che to suit its own needs and circumstances.

Very few young people today would subscribe to Che's belief that power can be seized through guerrilla warfare. But they are disillusioned with the wholesale embrace of capitalism that occurred across the region during the 1990's. They see it as having aggravated economic and social inequities that he railed against, and they are looking for alternatives.

Che provides that because he is ''a figure who can constantly be examined and re-examined,'' as Jon Lee Anderson, author of ''Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life,'' puts it.

''To the younger, post-cold-war generation of Latin Americans, Che stands up as the perennial Icarus, a self-immolating figure who represents the romantic tragedy of youth,'' he added. ''Their Che is not just a potent figure of protest, but the idealistic, questioning kid who exists in every society and every time.''

Both the memoir and the movie retell the eight-month, 7,500 mile odyssey across five South American countries that Guevara, then an asthmatic 23-year-old medical student, began here in December 1951. Traveling first on a rickety motorcycle named ''La Poderosa,'' the powerful one, and then as hitchhikers and stowaways, he and a friend crossed the pampas, traversed the Andes and navigated the Amazon before arriving in Caracas, Venezuela, and going their separate ways.

Che was simply Ernesto Guevara then, and his account of the journey is a classic coming-of-age story: a voyage of adventure and self-discovery that is both political and personal. ''We were just a pair of vagabonds with knapsacks on our backs, the dust of the road covering us, mere shadows of our old aristocratic egos,'' he writes when the pair reaches Valparaiso, Chile.

His companion on the trip, Alberto Granado Jiménez, is still alive and living in Cuba. At the age of 82, he traveled recently to Brazil for the premiere of the film and immediately noticed the change in Che's image. He said he found himself ''surrounded by young people asking beautiful things, not just about the movie, but about what Ernesto and I were feeling back then,'' he said.

''Practically nothing was asked about politics,'' Mr. Granado recalled, somewhat wistfully. ''They were more interested in the human aspect, in the story of how two young men, two normal people but dreamers and idealists, set out on an adventure and with optimism and impetuosity, achieve their objective.''

The Cuban government, which regards itself as the custodian of Che's image and controls much of his literary estate, has never much liked ''The Motorcycle Diaries.'' The book remained unpublished until the early 1990's, and even today, the officially authorized ''Complete Works of Ernesto Che Guevara'' includes his famous essays, ''On Guerrilla Warfare'' and ''Create Two, Three, Many Vietnams,'' but pointedly omits the diaries.

''The Cubans have excluded everything about Che that is not heroic, including that which is most deliciously human about him,'' said Mario O'Donnell, an Argentine psychoanalyst and historian who is the author of a recent biography published here. ''The personal doubts, the sexual escapades, the moments when he and Granado are drunk, none of that fits with the immortal warrior they want to project.''

That demystification is part of a broader process of de-Cubanizing Che. Though official Cuban accounts usually call him an ''internationalist'' (skipping any mention of his Argentine nationality), he spent only 8 of his 39 years in Cuba. In fact, he had renounced Cuban citizenship by the time of his death in 1967, when he was killed after the collapse of a guerrilla campaign in Bolivia.

Having grown up with Che as a brand name advertisement for protests of any sort, Latin Americans under 40 may have trouble regarding him with the same reverence as their elders do. So while Che continues to be a universal point of reference, some recent artistic treatments of him have also been tinged with irony.

In that vein, a Brazilian film comedy released last year imagines that Che never died but escaped to the Amazon jungle, where he runs a business selling T-shirts stamped with his own image. Here in Che's homeland, a popular singer-songwriter, Kevin Johansen, has a song called ''McGuevara's or CheDonald's.''

For an even younger generation, Che is perhaps becoming an even more remote figure who has already faded into history. ''I never had a Che T-shirt or poster because ever since I was a kid, I saw him, like many people do, as a distant image,'' the 25-year-old Mexican actor Gael García Bernal, who plays Che in the movie, confessed to reporters at Cannes last week.

''That's what happens with icons,'' said José Rivera, a Puerto Rican playwright and screenwriter who wrote the screenplay for the movie. ''They are recycled and made to wear the clothes of a new generation that is discovering them. We're not in the 60's anymore, so Che will not have the same power he had back then, and we will have to discover him in a new way.''

Photos: Top, Che Guevara's heroic image on a poster protesting the Iraq war. Below, a scene from the 2004 film about Che. (Photos by Paula Prandini, above; Agence France-Presse--Getty Images, top); Some say the young Che might be likened to James Dean, the 1950's youth icon. (Photo by Associated Press)