By Ryan Sexton, Assistant Entertainment Editor

If there’s anything that can be said about “Happiness Runs,” it’s that movies about people that are thoroughly baked don’t also have to be.  Set on an apparently disintegrating hippie commune in the present, the film focuses on the lives of the children of the communes founders.  As meandering as the granola munching, mindfulness cultivating, marijuana puffing characters are, the story has a tight focus. Ironically, for all their emphasis on free love and non judgement, the children of the commune don’t seem much better off, or perhaps worse off, than apathetic suburbanites. The movie is about the children who got left behind, as their parents clung to platitudes and ideals that they were sometimes as thin as the smoke permeating the shots.

Victor, (Mark L. Young) is the son of the meditating leader of the group. He decides he wants to leave the commune. All around, director Adam Sherman carries a motif of chaos. Victor and his friends see ten-year-olds smoking marijuana, his father leads groups of naked women in chants, instructing them to feel “everday, more and more attracted to me.” Everyone appears to be neurotically invested in their perfect-on-paper universe- except for Victor. Even worse, he begins having sexual encounters with Becky, a seemingly innocuous, pretty girl who can outsnort, smoke or drink any punk on the commune. Victor, who is starting to get disenchanted by these things, sees moments of clarity in Becky. But he can’t get her to leave: her father, who has cancer but refused conventional treatment and opted for naturopathic care, is dying. The film gets the viewer so invested in Victor’s plight, and in his quest for peace and quiet, that the latter half gets a bit unsatisfying. The film aggregates more and more chaos, but does not resolve Victor’s anxiety or the viewers’ until the very end.

Thematically, the movie seems to be building up to a coherent statement. But then Chad, one of Victor’s friends, burns a cow with gasoline. And Becky performs oral sex on him the next day, despite hating him for his dairy pyrotechnics. Where the movie excels is in its irony and misanthropy: in a world where everything was intended to be perfect, people are as sordid as ever.  Instead of the convergence, or answers, things seem to keep getting crazier. The color palette of the film goes from “Seven” to “Into the Wild” fairly quickly. If it wasn’t so well shot, it might seem a bit dry.

Near the film’s climax, Becky ingests copious amounts of hallucinogenic mushrooms, sitting on the edge of a pond illuminated by a few small fires. Eerily reminiscent of “Apocalypse Now,” the kids weren’t running from the VC, but from their own self destructive potential. No ending could possibly be better than the main character’s love interest jumping off a ferris wheel onto a school bus and dying: and that’s exactly what happens. With Becky’s death, Victor is finally free of any bond he had to the camp. After the 88 minutes, the viewer is surprised by the fact that such a seemingly boring movie could have enticed them so much. In terms of effect, this movie is certainly a sleeper: what initially seems to be a sociological inquiry quickly evolves into a feverishly paced drama and coming of age story.

“Hapiness Runs” comes to theaters May 7th.

Mark L. Young as Victor in 2010’s ‘Happiness Runs’ (Photo Courtesy of Strand Releasing)