Elliot Tiber (Demetri Martin, centre) gets high with a little help from his Volkswagen minivan friends (Kelli Garner, left, and Paul Dano) in Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock. (Alliance Films Media)

Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock is like one of those hippie brownies laced with hashish: it’s a sweet little chunk of 1960s nostalgia that gives you a pleasant buzz. But when you come down from the high two hours later, you start to wish Lee had served up something a bit more substantial.

Director Ang Lee takes a big risk in giving us a movie about Woodstock that stays entirely on the sidelines of the show itself.

Lee’s comedy/drama is a behind-the-scenes take on the much-documented, much-mythologized 1969 festival now regarded as the apotheosis of hippiedom. The story is based on Elliot Tiber’s 2007 memoir of the same name, which recounts his pivotal role in making the festival happen. Tiber was the guy who saved the event from being cancelled by luring promoters to Bethel, N.Y. He also introduced the organizers to dairy farmer Max Yasgur, whose property — complete with a natural concert bowl and a skinny-dipping pond — became the legendary site.

As played by comedian Demetri Martin, Elliot is a good Jewish boy with an inner streak of rebellion. When we meet him, he’s come back to Bethel to help his aging immigrant parents run their dilapidated motel and to serve as president of the local chamber of commerce. Before that, however, Elliot was living in New York’s Greenwich Village, where he just participated in another landmark event — the Stonewall riots, a milestone in the U.S. battle for gay rights. So when he hears that the authorities won’t allow a big outdoor rock festival in the New York town of Wallkill, it’s with a combination of business savvy and counterculture chutzpah that he suggests relocating it to his folks’ failing resort.

Hippie entrepreneur Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff, left) turns Elliot's family motel into Woodstock's operations hub. (Alliance Films Media)

Although the resort land proves too swampy and Yasgur’s farm is chosen instead, the motel becomes the base of operations for the festival’s organizers — including super-mellow hippie entrepreneur Michael Lang (a cherubic Jonathan Groff) and his joint-dispensing girlfriend Tisha (a wonderfully chilled-out Mamie Gummer). It also becomes a magnet for some cool freaks, like Vilma (Liev Schreiber), a pistol-packing transvestite and Korean War vet who volunteers to keep the small-town rednecks at bay. Then there’s local boy Billy (Emile Hirsch, doing a scarily good Charles Manson stare), a haunted veteran of the Vietnam War whose troubled soul is calmed by the fest’s good vibes.

Woodstock is portrayed here as a kind of benign, transformative drug that affects almost everyone in its radius. Cops become friendly. Elliot’s overworked dad (Henry Goodman) regains his joie de vivre. Even Elliot’s perpetually cranky mother (Imelda Staunton) softens up a little, helping the hippies park their psychedelic buses when she isn’t keeping them from practising free love on her property. (“No shtupping in the bushes!” she cries, flushing out one randy couple with her broom.)

Meanwhile, Elliot, who has left behind a broken relationship in Manhattan, finds new romance with one of the concert’s hunky stage builders, and has his mind expanded courtesy of pot and LSD.

Martin, the cerebral comic best known for his “youth spotting” segments on The Daily Show, is both perfectly cast as Elliot and a physical embodiment of the movie’s sweet innocence. With his Rubber Soul-era Beatles haircut and banana nose, Martin already looks intriguingly retro — part Ringo Starr, part Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. Like Hoffman in that film, he also has a charmingly deadpan combination of intellect and naivety.

Actually, the casting is felicitous on all counts. Eugene Levy of SCTV fame does a lovely understated turn as pipe-smoking Max Yasgur, at once an avuncular defender of the flower children and a shrewd businessman. It’s Staunton, however, who gives the most surprising performance, as Elliot’s mother. The British actress, who starred as the gentle abortionist in Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake, is virtually unrecognizable here as a selfish, bitter old lady with a Russian-Jewish accent so thick you could spread it on pumpernickel. At first she’s just a comic figure, the sort of crabby foil to hippie kids you’d find in a comedy from that era. Later, though, her greed and insecurity turn poignant as she comes to represent the fear and vulnerability of an earlier generation that survived the Holocaust by the skin of its teeth.

Elliot (Demetri Martin, right) explains how property belonging to farmer Max Yasgur (Eugene Levy) is perfect for the Woodstock festival. (Alliance Films Media)

Lee and long-time screenwriting collaborator James Schamus touch upon the gap that divided the wartime generation from their postwar children, but also the bond that Jews like Yasgur and Elliot’s parents had with the counterculture. Rural New York proves as rife with anti-Semitism as it is with anti-hippie sentiment — both seemingly threaten the WASP way of life.

This appreciation of the social tensions that made the Woodstock idyll seem such a triumph is one of the strengths of the film. However, Lee takes a big risk in giving us a movie about an epochal concert that stays entirely on the sidelines of the show itself. Elliot’s pilgrimages from the motel to the concert site never get further than the brow of the hill overlooking the distant stage. The musicians — including Arlo Guthrie and Canned Heat, who stayed at the motel — are never seen. The iconic Woodstock music — Jimi Hendrix’s brutal, beautiful dismemberment of The Star Spangled Banner, Country Joe McDonald’s cheerfully sarcastic anti-Vietnam sing-along — is only hinted at in a few chords or strains wafting through Danny Elfman’s soundtrack.

True, if we want the concert, there’s the Oscar-winning 1972 documentary, but it still feels odd and, finally, unsatisfying that one of the main ingredients of Woodstock’s magic has been left out of the mix. It’s too bad, because in other respects, this movie is a pretty groovy trip. As they did with 1970s suburban unease in The Ice Storm, Lee and Schamus treat the buoyant idealism of the late-’60s youth movement with a kind of fond indulgence. They’re abetted by the affectionate period details of production designer David Gropman (Doubt) and the pastoral cinematography of Eric Gautier (Into the Wild, Summer Hours).

At its best, Taking Woodstock successfully recaptures the golden aura of that mad, muddy love-in, which perhaps seemed more earth shattering at the time than it does now in retrospect.

Taking Woodstock opens Aug. 28.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.