The documentarian Errol Morris has a remarkable gift for finding interview subjects with bizarre stories to tell. In My Psychedelic Love Story, Morris introduces us to Joanna Harcourt-Smith, who was swept off her feet in 1972 by bad boy celebrity Timothy Leary and spent a few years as his romantic partner. This was a period when Leary, hounded by US authorities for advocating psychedelic drug use, was on the lam in Europe and the Middle East, and finally imprisoned.
Morris extracts the tale from Harcourt-Smith herself. We learned that Harcourt-Smith came from a wealthy but difficult and unconventional upbringing. She plunged into a hippie version of what we would now call a Eurotrash lifestyle.
While much of her story is undeniably factual, we suspect that Harcourt-Smith is less than a reliable narrator. She drops bits like “I was happy we were stopping in Lebanon because the President was in love with my mother”. It’s either an astonishing fact or a an astonishingly brazen lie. Either way, she’s entertaining.
I’ve loved Morris since his first feature in 1978, Gates of Heaven, the story of a Bay Area pet cemetery and its quirky owners and customers (plus digging up all the dead pets and moving them from Cupertino to Napa). For bizarre personal stories, it’s tough to top Morris’ Tabloid, about a woman who kidnapped and sexually abused a Mormon missionary in England and retired in North Carolina to a pastime of tending dogs cloned in Korea,
My Psychedelic Love Story, which is minor Morris, is streaming on Showtime.