DIR. JONATHON LEE | 2011 | USA | 89 MIN

Paul Goodman's 1960 best-seller, Growing Up Absurd, became a cornerstone of countercultural thinking, alongside books like The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and The Feminine Mystique. A brilliant radical thinker and critic, Paul Goodman would have been at the forefront of today’s occupy movement. Paul Goodman Changed My Life immerses you in an era of high intellect (that heady, cocktail-glass juncture that Mad Men has so effectively exploited) when New York was peaking culturally and artistically; when ideas, and the people who propounded them, seemed to punch in at a higher weight class than they do now.

Using a treasure trove of archival multimedia—selections from Goodman’s poetry; quotes from Susan Sontag, Martin Luther King Jr. and Noam Chomsky; plentiful footage of Goodman himself; plus interviews with his family, peers and activists—director Jonathan Lee has woven together a rich portrait of an intellectual heavyweight whose ideas are long overdue for rediscovery. Today, much of what passes as common knowledge in the fields of education, politics, psychology, urban planning, civil rights, and sexual politics was first posited by him nearly half a century ago.