HOW THE AGE OF AQUARIUS ALMOST DIDN’T HAPPEN

Most filmgoers have already seen Michael Wadleigh's definitive and Academy Award-winning documentary, Woodstock. So Director Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain) wisely avoids treading on familiar ground – the concert and music itself – to focus instead on the smaller story of how a handful of unsuspecting locals in upstate New York caused the quintessential concert to take place where it did, almost by accident.

This cinematic device allows us to follow the 3-day event through the eyes of Elliot Teichberg (Demetri Martin), a Greenwich Village designer dropout who is living with his elderly parents at their run-down Catskills El Monaco Motel. The B&B, which is on the brink of failure and his chronically enraged mother, Sonia (Imelda Staunton), and his confounding passive father, Jake (Henry Goodman), seen incapable of finding a way to prevent the bank from foreclosing.

When Elliot hears that a three-day music and arts festival has had its permit denied by a nearby town, he contacts the promoter, Michael Lang -- played in one of the film's finest performances by Broadway star Jonathan Groff -- and invites him to check out his family's motel, and the nearby town of Bethel. (Elliot, who sees an economic future in the arts, already holds a permit for a music festival, albeit one he envisioned along the lines of chamber music and string quartets.) When Lang and his retinue arrive, Elliot introduces them to a bespectacled, mild-mannered dairy farmer named Max Yasgur (a terrific Eugene Levy), whose verdant 600-acre property Lang deems ideal for his event. After cutting a deal over milk and cookies, it's decided. The local townspeople yawn and expect few to show up, never dreaming in just a few weeks a half a million young people would be making the pilgrimage to Yasgur's farm, causing their delicate infrastructure to be tested to the brink, and changing their lives forever.

Lee pays due homage to the original Woodstock movie with his own split-screen moments, and he even re-creates some of the documentary's iconic scenes. But in his hands, they become vehicles for personal breakthroughs that are often surprisingly touching. Elliot meets characters and situations he could not have comprehended just a few weeks earlier.

One of the most moving scenes in the film is when Elliot, his dad and a transvestite ex-Marine named Vilma (played in a lovely, understated performance by Liev Schreiber) go down to a river to observe the skinny-dippers and the faint strains of Richie Havens singing "Freedom" waft over the water. Later, after Elliot decides to see the concert for himself, he and an old friend, a troubled Vietnam War veteran named Billy (Emile Hirsch), take part in the mud slide that was so famously captured in Wadleigh's film. What would otherwise be a rote, purely atmospheric sequence instead becomes a vehicle for one man rediscovering his past, while another finally faces his future.

The movie's emotional high point is when Elliot, riding on the back of a policeman's motorcycle, takes a meandering trip through a serpentine throng of people making their way to Yasgur's pasture. It's a gorgeous sequence, shot in an unbroken take that manages to instill a sense of spontaneity and wonder.

What you may not know is that one of our members (Paki) actually attended the original event and has some wild stories to share that supplement what was not depicted on the screen. Seek her out at the next SCNA party.