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Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place
Stars: Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, Stanley Tucci
Director: Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood
Another week, another independent film hallowed by Sundance selection.
This self-consciously anarchic blast from the past (the original 16 mm footage was shot in 1964, never finished and had remained virtually unseen prior to being and reassembled by directors Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood.
How modern audiences whose only exposure to the drug fuelled 1960s is most probably limited to believing the self-indulgent excesses of Easy Rider will take this story of a LSD and liquor-fuelled odyssey across the United States from California to New York and the World Fair in 1964 is anyones guess.
The protagonists here are Ken Kesey, celebrated as the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest who, joined by the renegade group of counter culture truth-seekers", including Neal Cassidy, immortalized in Jack Kerouacs On the Road, drove their psychedelic Magic Bus across country intending to make a documentary of their trip. And trip in the truest sense of all-American drug and drink taking it certainly turned out to be, ingeniously resurrected and commented upon by Gibney and Ellwood. Documentaries about egos rampant are usually good value. This is one such offering. And, providing you go with the flow of a long-ago age, it offers something of a high.
Alan Frank
USA 2011. UK Distributor: StudioCanal. Colour.
107 minutes. Not widescreen. UK certificate: 15.
Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 3, Violence/Horror 0, Drugs 3, Swearing 3.
Review date: 18 Nov 2011