In 1964, Ken Kesey and a group of friends (dubbed the Merry Pranksters) embarked on a bus ride across the country, taking copious amounts of LSD and footage along the way. It was one of the defining moments of the psychedelic sixties, a forerunner to the explosion of hippie culture that followed soon after. Kesey’s access to drugs through government-sponsored testing gave him a taste for altered states of mind, a taste that he and his cohorts readily passed on to others as they crossed the country. The Merry Pranksters sought to document their epic trip with hundreds of hours of footage, but despite multiple editing attempts, the footage remained on the cutting room floor. Enter directors Alex Gibney and Alison Ellberg, who have lovingly pieced together the footage and audiotaped recordings. With artistic flourishes and inspired music, Magic Trip immerses us in a moment in time when hippie ideology was truly being realized, before it all went bust.  RM