Who's In It: Demetri Martin, Emile Hirsch, Imelda Staunton, Henry Goodman, Jonathan Groff, Mamie Gummer, Eugene Levy, Liev Schreiber, Paul Dano
The Basics: A young, semi-closeted gay guy helps organize the Woodstock music festival. And what he finds is that hippies are really sweet and kind and loving and responsible and frequently so freshly-scrubbed that you'd never know that they went weeks without bathing or walked round barefoot all the time. Those generous hippies will also bake pot brownies for your grumpy, old-world mom and get her to dance in the rain and say, "Far out." Stuff like that.
What's The Deal: Something tells me that this movie has very little in common with the memoir written by the not-so-closeted-anymore-now-that-he's-about-60-years-old Elliot Tiber. Not that I care. I've always been a big fan of happy faux-groovy movie hippies in films like Skidoo and Riot on Sunset Strip. So take those two cultural flower-power moments and their willingness to allow Carol Channing to go-go dance and Jackie Gleason to drop acid, mix them with naughty R-rated stuff like full frontal nudity and borrow the gee-whiz tone of Mod 1968 Teen Nun movies like Where Angels Go Trouble Follows and suddenly you've got a strange little Woodstock story on your hands that seems to have not much to do with Woodstock at all.
But Still, It's Not That Good and Here's Why: Full of cliche moments like the mom-on-drugs part I mentioned earlier. And it shuffles slowly along with a meandering, go-nowwhere plot that wants to accumulate goodwill through sheer goofy sunshine-day enthusiasm and make you forget that nothing is really going on besides a story about a young man learning to be free, man, free.
Who Saves It: Hilariously mellow Spring Awakening star Jonathan Groff as the concert promoter, always shirtless in a leather vest, perfectly coiffed, riding a horse and being chill. Liev Schreiber is also cool as the gun-packing, transgendered security guard who's always flirting with Eugene Levy.
What Ang Lee Must Have Been Thinking: "I'm tired of making downer movies about people being sexually brutalized in Japanese Occupied China and tormented gay sheep-herders. Somebody bring me a sitcom about Woodstock. I will take the episode of The Brady Bunch where Greg turns Dad's office into a hippie den as inspiration."