Like father? Not all, son

“I practiced saying ‘groovy’ a lot without it sounding silly -- at the time it didn’t have the weight of cheesiness it has now,” laughed Nick Roth, the 22-year-old star of the new feature “Berkeley,” about an 18-year-old caught up in the countercultural maelstrom of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll in 1968. (It opens today for a weeklong run in L.A.)

The film was written, directed and self-distributed by his father, Bobby Roth, a veteran independent film auteur (“Heartbreakers,” “Jack the Dog,” “Manhood”) who has been directing television shows including “Prison Break,” “Without a Trace” and “Lost” to pay the rent but wanted to do a more personal project on his own dime to help recapture his experiences at the time and to connect with his son’s generation.

“We had something called ‘hippie boot camp,’ because I wanted the kids to get things right,” Bobby Roth said. “We rewatched movies like ‘Woodstock’ and ‘Monterey Pop,’ as well as not-so-successful films like ‘Getting Straight’ and ‘The Strawberry Statement.’ One of the movies I’m really critical of was ‘The Doors’ -- they got the clothing right, but they never got the mind-set. It was campy to me. I saw the movie with Bruce Springsteen (he’s married to Bruce’s younger sister, Pam), and we laughed because we’d both met Jim Morrison in our youth. Even though Val Kilmer looked like him, he didn’t get it.”

“Berkeley” tells the story of Ben Sweet (Nick), a Southern California transplant from a conservative family (his father is played by Henry Winkler) who has his mind blown by the experiences of the time, including sexual experimentation and his friendship with a childhood friend who heads further and further into the radical fringe, which causes the real-life burning of the Bank of America near Santa Barbara.

What was it like for his son to reenact his dad’s exploits?

“That’s a really loaded question,” shrugged Nick, looking every bit the boho recent UC Berkeley graduate that he is in a Springsteen T-shirt, jeans and stubble as he sat at La Val’s pizza place on the north side of campus. “It’s drawn from his experience, but it’s not on the nose. I would never have been able to play the role if I had been thinking about it.”

“The character he played in the movie was much more innocent than I was,” his father echoed. “I tried not to get caught up in my personal experiences. I thought that by making a picture like this we could communicate the amazing empowerment we got by being socially active. I saw a hunger that wasn’t getting met.”

“I have so many friends who are antiwar who would get into a movement like that in a heartbeat,” Nick said. “The biggest difference is that there’s no draft now, so it’s not affecting our lives as immediately, but that fervor still exists. If there was just a slight sociopolitical shift, you’d have it back again.”

Not all of their projects have been as socially conscious. In the 2004 ABC Family television movie “Brave New Girl,” Nick played the lead male role, directed by his father. (It was based on the novel by Britney Spears and her mother, Lynne.

“I never got to meet Britney,” Nick said. “This was before the whole media explosion of bad press about her. We were in preproduction when she got married and divorced in, like, a day. But I still get MySpace messages about it.”

“Berkeley,” co-produced by Roth’s longtime partner and college roommate Jeffrey White, was initially shot three years ago on a tight 15-day schedule and digitally photographed to capture the authenticity of the period and save money. It’s been on the shelf because “I directed 11 episodes of television last year, so I wasn’t able to give this the attention it deserved until now,” Roth said.

The director got one of his boyhood heroes, Country Joe McDonald, to contribute to the soundtrack. Tom Morello, formerly of Rage Against the Machine, also has a part in the film as a disillusioned Vietnam veteran. But Morello’s involvement made the scenes in which Sweet’s character jams with some friends more complicated.

“We were supposed to be this really crappy band, but when he came in to play drums it sounded too good,” Nick recalled. “My dad always said he had the option of saying, ‘No, play it worse,’ but it was so rockin’ -- how could you not have him do it?”

But there was one aspect of his father’s Berkeley experience his son did not repeat.

“I told my dad, ‘If you want me to take acid, I’m willing to do it, but only if you need me to do it for the movie,” Nick said. “He just looked at me and said, ‘Try acting.’ ”