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Timothy Leary, the rock star professor of 1960s acid-head mysticism, had a smile that said a lot about him. He was quite handsome, with that mane of dark silver hair, the protruding chin and Irish eyes, that glittering tooth-wall smile. He looked like a brother Kennedy who never was: a counterculture guru who could have doubled as a politician. The smile is part of what made Leary such an effective piper. He always seemed to say, “I’m tripping my brain and having more fun than my life!” Yet it didn’t take long to see that Leary’s smile seemed extraordinarily pleased with itself. It flashed on and off (it was always on for cameras), and had a way of beaming that was more than a little greasy, Liberace-like. Leary never stopped talking about how LSD would free everyone, but the main beneficiary of all the good vibes seemed to be him.
Errol Morris’ new film, “My Psychedelic Love Story” (premieres tonight on Showtime), tells a confusing love story centered around Leary in the 1970s, when her heyday as a youth culture celebrity was for further behind but his infamy remained front and center. President Nixon had been targeting drug culture (it was all tied to his war on crime), and Leary was still the elderly boy who was manifest for infusing the drug experience with high-sounding credibility. As a result, he was targeted as a criminal. He went in and out of prison and in early 1973, seeking refuge abroad, ended up jumping from Lausanne to Vienna, from Beirut to Kabul, in an attempt to escape the American authorities.
Accompanying him on this shaky journey was his much younger girlfriend he had met just a few weeks earlier, Joanna Harcourt-Smith (he was 52, she was 27), a British socialite born in Switzerland whose relationship with Leary – he loved, he idolized and devoted himself to him – vaguely reminiscent, in a runaway renegade way, of Joyce Maynard and JD Salinger. Harcourt-Smith, who died just a month ago, aged 74, is the central figure – indeed, the only figure interviewed – in Morris’ documentary; the film is her psychedelic love story. She and Leary traveled, in her own words, “like shooting stars across Europe, taking acid every day,” and the film tells the story of that journey, which presents as a scruffy 1970s version of a weird – the – Odyssey Rabbit’s Den.
Morris, whose voice is periodically heard off-screen, treats the film as a true thriller with surreal paranoid touches, starting with the hint that Harcourt-Smith may have been some sort of CIA plant. The soundtrack throbs menacingly and hums as if it were straight out of a Costa-Gavras film. There are reel-to-reel tapes of an interview with Leary where he seems to playfully hiding a big secret, and there’s a mention that he escaped from prison with the help of members of the Weather Underground – which sounds dramatic, except we never heard how it happened. As a documentary maker, Errol Morris has always been a singular visual craftsman (he has the eye of an established drama creator), and in “My Psychedelic Love Story” he creates pop montages that look like outtakes from “Natural Born Killers” and points the film with allusions ranging from Disney’s 1951 “Alice in Wonderland” to multiple iconic images printed on absorbent acid such as Warhol’s mini screen prints, all to create a mythological shell for the story he is telling.
But the story with which he fills that shell turns out to be rather mundane, and not entirely resonant in terms of the holocaust mystique of the 1970s, scum of the counterculture. When you watch a documentary, some talking heads are more interesting than others, and Joanna Harcourt-Smith, sitting in front of Morris’s camera, looks like a support player who has been elevated to command. She’s been with Leary for most of the five years, between her fourth and fifth wives, and her story certainly seems worth a movie, but she’s not a charming storyteller.
She speaks with an extremely deliberate and serious European accent that makes her sound like Nico’s bureaucrat sister. And even though she ran with a lot of the famous’s parasites, like an acquaintance of Keith Richards who claims she was the subject of “Tumbling Dice”, she’s not a charmed figure like Patty Hearst, and she’s not the kind of person who turns on the lens. of the camera. He has a socialite way of naming names (“We were with this friend of mine, Diane von Furstenberg,” “Adnan Khashoggi gave me a couple of Quaaludes”), and in the films and photographs we see from 1973 to ’74, yes she presents as a seriously endearing young woman, with severe dark brows, who was, in her own way, incredibly “naive”.
Harcourt-Smith appears to have contacted Morris after being fascinated by his 2017 Netflix documentary miniseries “Wormwood,” which dealt with LSD and the government malfunction in the 1950s. The film is based on her memoir “Tripping the Bardo with Timothy Leary: My Psychedelic Love Story” (released in 2013), and follows how she went from being Leary’s lover in a short space of time. finally, his partner-at-arms to the intermediary who brokered the communication between Leary and the FBI.
Yet the reason none of this is half as interesting as the film seems to think is that Leary himself, by this point, had become a rather scurrilous generational spokesperson. At first, we see a black and white clip of her from the 1960s, which says, “We’re teaching people how to use their heads. The point is, to use your head, you have to get out of your mind. “That was, and remains, a bold idea; the idea that LSD could provide some kind of metaphysical therapy, allowing you to travel out of yourself and then back, has a validity that many psychiatrists now believe. Leary was a visionary, ahead of his time, and in his own way was fearless. But in the mid-1970s, when he was drinking acid like most people open a beer, he presents himself more as a drug addict and an opportunist, not to talk about an old little dog that rode in a canary yellow Porsche.
The only real twist in “My Psychedelic Love Story” comes towards the end, when Harcourt-Smith, to help Leary, agreed to wear a telegram and engage in bogus drug deals to trap various types of counterculture lawyers – and Leary turned into an informant to get out of jail, infuriating friends like Allen Ginsburg. Harcourt-Smith explains why he did it, and it’s chilling: the government has threatened him in an absolutely unreasonable way. Timothy Leary’s story fits into the larger saga of how drug use has, in many ways, been over-criminalized in America. (There are people who went to jail for smoking a joint. But if everyone in America who smoked a joint was now in prison … well, you see where it ends.) But Leary, like the LSD bard , ended up both as a victim and as an exploiter of his own fame. Joanne Harcourt-Smith, overwhelmed by her mystique, may have thought she was stuck in a story of love and revolution for the ages, but in many ways she was ready for the journey.
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