My Psychedelic Love Story

“My Psychedelic Love Story” tells a ragtag outlaw romantic story of Timothy Leary.  He was in and out of prison, and early in 1973, seeking refuge abroad, he wound up skipping from Lausanne to Vienna to Beirut to Kabul, all in an attempt to evade the American authorities. Joining him for this lurching journey of freedom was the much younger girlfriend he’d met only weeks before, Joanna Harcourt-Smith (he was 52, she was 27) She loved, idolized, and devoted herself to him. The film is her psychedelic love story. She and Leary traveled, in her words, “like shooting stars across Europe, taking acid every day,” and the movie tells the story of that journey, which it presents as a scraggly ’70s version of a stranger-than-fiction, down-the-rabbit-hole odyssey.