Cinema: Like It Was

You Are What You Eat is a historical documentary of considerable charm. What it documents is not so much a state of affairs as a state of mind —the dreamy life-style of the U.S. hippie back in 1967. Like its subject, it is both brash and beautiful, dull and delightful, exhibitionistic and embarrassed. For adults sufficiently permissive just to sit back and inhale, it is a gas.

The film is a collaboration of three senior citizens—Producer-Composer Peter Yarrow, 30, of Peter, Paul and Mary; Cameraman Barry Feinstein, 37; and Entrepreneur Michael Butler, 41, the Chicago millionaire who brought Hair to Broadway. You Are What You Eat is a jump-cut collage of footage put together without pretense of plot. It keeps the eyeballs popping and the ear bones ringing.

The familiar youth doings are all done, and overdone: lovemaking, pot puffing, flower munching, motorcycling, fountain dunking, and general roughhousing. Included also are a few bad scenes with the police. There are stars of sorts. “Super Spade”* carries on a droll nonstop phone conversation. He couples with a white girl (on-camera, but discreetly). He has a deliciously comic encounter with a nun. The Rev. Malcolm Boyd (Are You Running with Me, Jesus?) runs ecstatically around a beach at dawn with a bunch of happy hippies. Tiny Tim goes his well-known episcenic route—fluttering and twittering with a deep-voiced girl through a funny duet version of I Got You Babe.

As a celebration of the Now scene at one particular time and place, You Are What You Eat effectively matches technique and subject matter. But much like Revolution (TIME, Aug. 16), another chronicle of the happiness’ that was Hashbury, the film raises one small doubt that the reality of hippiedom in full flower was ever quite as groovy as the camera makes it seem.

* Bill Powell Jr., who was murdered last year by San Francisco mobsters because he gave away free pot and LSD.