Catching up with ‘Sean,’ the pot-smoking 4-year-old

The film was called, simply, “Sean.” It was short, made in black and white by a San Francisco college student named Ralph Arlyck, and it was released in 1969. The Sean in the title was a lively, precocious 4-year-old boy whose parents were Haight-Ashbury hippies living two floors above Arlyck.

All the filmmaker did was talk to Sean -- follow him around the neighborhood and talk with him about such sundry topics as living free, relations with the police and smoking pot. (Apparently, Sean liked to eat it more than smoke it.)

“Sean” the movie became a kind of Rorschach test for 1960s audiences, half of whom saw the kid as a joyful harbinger of flower power’s apotheosis, while the other half thought somebody should call the family services people pronto.

“Following Sean,” a feature-length sequel 30-plus years in the making, seems to offer a premise just as simple as the original short. Arlyck decides to find out whatever became of Sean. Did he stay a hippie? Or did he veer in other directions, such as a Hell’s Angel or a stockbroker? The answer and, thus, the film, prove much more complicated than anyone, Arlyck included, could have imagined.

It takes half an hour to find Sean the grown-up as charming and unaffected as Sean the child. He’s an electrician, leading a pleasant, if relatively fretless life in the Bay Area. But Arlyck doesn’t stop there. From the beginning of the film, Arlyck broadens his inquiry to take in not just Sean but the filmmaker’s own growth over four decades into a family man. He even finds parallels with his original subject because both families have ties to 1930s leftist politics and 1960s countercultural yearnings.

What emerges from Arlyck’s musings is a penetrating cinematic essay on how generations in the last century struggled to take hold of history and reconfigure the shape of daily life. Arlyck neither exalts nor condemns such efforts. What he does leave you feeling is that daily life can’t be forced or processed into shape. It’s something you’re compelled to negotiate, every minute of every hour of every day.

*

‘Following Sean’

MPAA rating: Unrated (nudity, vulgarity, drug content)

An Upstate Films/Shadow Distribution release. Writer-director-editor Ralph Arlyck. Producers Arlyck, Malcolm Pullinger.

Running time: 1 hour, 27 minutes.

Exclusively at Laemmle’s Fairfax Cinemas, 7907 Beverly Blvd. (at Fairfax Avenue) (323) 655-4010.