In his documentary Following Sean, director Ralph Arlyck capitalized upon an unusual opportunity to update and reexamine -- after the passage of about 30 years -- the life of a four-year-old he'd first filmed in 1967. Other filmmakers have done this as well, most notably Michael Apted in his ongoing series of documentaries that check in with a diverse group of British men and women every seven years. Following Sean is different, though, both because it concentrates exclusively on one figure, Sean Farrell, and because Farrell's story is interwoven to some degree with the director's own life journey. Farrell's tale is fascinating enough on its own terms, as this child of a rather unkempt Haight-Ashbury household has grown up not to be the idealistic second-generation hippie or messed-up junkie that some would assume to be the likely result. Instead, he's a rather average, decent, grounded young man struggling to get by, working hard and responsibly to support himself, yet also troubled by an unsteady relationship with his father, and a rocky marriage that ends in separation. Arlyck cannily moves between vintage footage with interviews of Sean as a four-year-old -- in which the child's a happy product of the Summer of Love, exposed to drugs and the counterculture far earlier than seems sensible -- and scenes of Sean, filmed over a period of ten years starting in the mid-'90s, in which he navigates the usual ups and downs of his age, the extremes of his upbringing apparently largely submerged.
It becomes apparent over the course of the film, though, that not all is as stable with Sean as it seems, and that he's not as straightforward and forthcoming about his life as it appears. It only gradually emerges, for instance, that his family is fairly dysfunctional in some ways; that he used to perform in a punk band that never got very far, and has given up those musical aspirations; and that despite holding a degree from a prestigious university, he's working -- for reasons never fully explicated -- as a skilled laborer of sorts. Arlyck also on occasion detours from Sean's story to reflect on his own rocky path from idealistic '60s filmmaker to a married man struggling to balance his artistic aspirations with financial and family realities, a mix that's interesting, but that some viewers might find a little distracting or unsatisfying. The core of the documentary, however, is an absorbing illustration of a life in which things, as they do in most lives, don't turn out as we would expect.