Tubegazing

Following Sean

(P.O.V. on PBS, July 31, 10 p.m.) Ralph Arlyck's bittersweet meditation on the idealism of youth and the compromises of adulthood is a clear-eyed valentine to the 1960s. As a young filmmaker in San Francisco's 1968 counterculture movement, he made a 15-minute film about a 4-year-old hippie child named Sean who smoked pot and ran barefoot. The short became a sensation. This PBS special, made from the perspective of Arlyck and Sean, who is now a union electrician and Berkeley grad, examines the fates of the colorful cast that populated Sean's world. No matter your politics, this is a journey past nostalgia into adult understanding. Grade: B+