Taking Woodstock
(Ang Lee): Henry Goodman, Imelda Staunton, Demetri Martin, Emile Hirsch.
Running time: 110 minutes (16)
Rating: 2/5

Ang Lee's coming-of-age story and gentle tribute to the 1969 Woodstock festival is baby-boomer nostalgia. It also plays out like the trajectory of a first acid trip. Our hero, based on the real-life Elliot Tiber (Henry Goodman), who brought the festival organisers to the hamlet of White Lake in Bethel, New York, is a twentysomething in-the-closet still under the thumb of his parents. (Imelda Staunton as his old-school Jewish mother is sensational.) The festival engorges the town, he takes acid, and nothing will be the same again. This is a weak Lee film – affectionate but directionless. It lacks any real drama, other than the drama of putting the festival together, which is an inevitability. It wafts along on the vapours of its stoned languor and indulges in bizarre cameos: Emile Hirsch as an OTT Vietnam vet; and that bear of a man, Liev Schrieber, as a bizarre cross-dressing security guard. You begin to feel you are less at a film than caught at a music festival full of aimless distractions.