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The American Dreamer is a hippie nightmare

THE AMERICAN DREAMER (L.M. Kit Carson, Lawrence Schiller). 88 minutes. See listing. Rating: NN


Finally in theatres 45 years after its completion, Lawrence Schiller and L.M. “Kit” Carson’s The American Dreamer is a 1971 documentary that follows Dennis Hopper around while he pontificates to the camera about sex, fame and capitalism. 

Well, it’s mostly a documentary. Co-directors Schiller and Carson made their film in close collaboration with their subject, with whom they share writing credits.

Produced with the expectation that it would play college campuses, thus turning on millions of American students to counterculture ideas about celebrity, The American Dreamer now plays like a compendium of obnoxious 60s hippie attitudes. 

Hopper’s incoherent, drug-fuelled rambling is packaged with random freeze-frames and flashes of nudity broken up by montages set to meandering folk songs. And while the auteur – still riding very high after the success of Easy Rider – is happy to proclaim his enlightenment at every opportunity, it doesn’t quite land. In one great moment, he -enthusiastically declares himself an honorary -lesbian to a woman who keeps trying to explain why that’s not a thing. 

As a piece of cultural history it’s kind of interesting. But as a documentary it’s pointless. 

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