'Following Sean' speaks to a generation

Ralph Arlyck's marvelous documentary "Following Sean" could just as well be called "Finding Ralph." In the late '60s, Arlyck left his East Coast Jewish intellectual life and moved west to Haight-Ashbury at the height of the hippie scene. Charles Manson lived across the street and the consummate flower-power couple lived upstairs.

Upstate Films 'Following Sean' B+ The verdict: Slight documentary is exquisitely resonant. Director: Ralph Arlyck Starring: Ralph Arlyck, Sean Farrell Run time: 88 minutes Rating: Not rated, but there is drug use. On the web Official movie site Rate 'Following Sean'   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

Arlyck made a 15-minute student film about their precocious 4-year-old son, Sean. An adorable moppet with a Beatles mop-top, Sean ran barefoot through the crowded street festival that was the Haight and casually admitted he preferred eating grass to smoking it. And he didn't like speed freaks because they were mean.

The film was meant as a benign peep into the counterculture, but instead became a somewhat controversial establishment vs. anti-establishment cause-celebre on the film-festival circuit (where it was sometimes paired with Truffaut's "The Wild Child").

Twenty-five years later, Arlyck returns to San Francisco to find out what happened to Sean. His journey also becomes something of a quest inside himself.

Sean, he learns, ended up neither strung-out nor a straight arrow. Now a handsome, slightly pudgy 31-year-old with a puckish smile and an easy-going manner, he worked as an electrician. Over the next few years, Arlyck chronicled Sean's life, interspersing it at times with footage from the original short film.

Sean is amazingly cooperative; Arlyck now seems more adrift than his subject. For the most part, Sean takes these intrusions with patience and good humor. Intertwined with Sean's story are interviews with his father, who still embraces the hippie ideal; his mother, who runs a day care center; and Arlyck's own family, which includes his pretty French wife and his sometimes skeptical two sons.

The documentary somewhat recalls Michael Apted's "7 Up" series, in which the British filmmaker returned every seven years to interview a group of now-adults he first filmed when they were age 7. But "Following Sean" takes off on its own path. Part nostalgia trip, part social essay, part personal diary, the film captures the counterculture — the middle-class kids who turned themselves into vagabond kings and Suzy-Creamcheese sprites. It's what "Easy Rider," with all its bogus pseudo-hippie hokum, missed.

Arlyck himself admits he was always deeply ambivalent about the whole scene. His favorite bumper sticker at the time, he tells us, was, "Hate cops? Next time you're in trouble, try calling a hippie."

Near the end, you begin to resent Arlyck's home invasions (so to speak). You wonder if, lacking a satisfying life of his own, the filmmaker's attached himself leech-like to Sean, the symbol of a time when he briefly mattered to someone other than his family and himself.

Yet "Following Sean" is too deeply human to dislike. Character-driven and full of tender contradictions, the film is reminiscent of a Chekhov short story. And as such, it touches on a universality that transcends VW buses and Bush-era politics.