In the beginning was the word: Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, published in 1968, evocatively reconstructed Ken Kesey and the Merry Band of Pranksters’ cross-country bus trip of four years earlier. The book remains one of the seminal accounts of the decade’s social, artistic and hallucinogenic experiments.
Now come the images: Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood have built a documentary, Magic Trip, from the 16mm color film the Pranksters shot along the way. The rarely seen (and carefully restored) footage looks good, although the lack of synchronized sound gives it a home-movie feel. The travelers did record sound, but it rarely matched the film. So the directors rely on audio interviews with the participants, recorded a decade after the excursion.
For those already somewhat familiar with the subject, the directors’ distillation of these 40 hours of film will expand their knowledge — if not their consciousness. But other viewers may spend the whole movie wondering exactly when the merry magic is going to kick in.
The sparse narration, voiced by Stanley Tucci, oversells the significance of what’s on-screen. The movie’s prologue claims that the Pranksters’ journey “changed everything.” But surely the tie-dyed escapade was a symptom, not a cause, of the era’s burgeoning youth culture.
As Wolfe detailed, Kesey moved through multiple worlds. He was an all-American, small-town boy who became an acclaimed novelist at 27 with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He was an early advocate of LSD and other psychedelics, and a patron of the Grateful Dead. And though he considered himself “too young to be a beat,” he knew Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and most of the rest. Indeed, the Pranksters’ bus driver was Neal Cassady, the Kerouac pal lightly fictionalized as Dean Moriarty in On the Road.