Showing @ Filmhouse, Edinburgh until Sun 15 Jan – run ended

Alison Ellwood, Alex Gibney / USA / 2011 / 107 mins

It’s kind of a static format today – a portrait film with archival footage from the 60s – so documentaries must simply do more if they are to stir or inflame something within us. Alison Ellwood and Alex Gibney’s joint venture offers some curious glimpses into 60s free-wheeling culture but doesn’t really deliver anything interesting enough to linger in the memory.

Completed 10 years after the death of author Ken Kesey, known largely for his 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the film churns out footage taken during a road trip with Kesey and his “merry pranksters” in 1964. The film is therefore more an homage or even a memorial to the life of Kesey, edited in such a way where the voices on tape speak of the drugs and the freedom nostalgically and lovingly – about Ken as a renegade who embraced the liberated attitudes the counterculture movement brought about. Spliced with road-trip country rock, the digitally restored footage gives the aesthetic a certain 60s edge, rugged and constantly in motion. And while it remains a wistful shufti into Kesey’s life and attitudes, the film is a disappointing far cry from Ellwood and Gibney’s involvement in the somewhat more passionately serious Enron, Gonzo and Catching Hell documentaries.