Plot Summary: Paul Goodman was once so ubiquitous in the American zeitgeist that he merited a cameo in Woody Allen's "Annie Hall." Author of legendary bestseller "Growing Up Absurd" (1960), Goodman was also a poet, 1940s out queer (and family man), pacifist, visionary, co-founder of Gestalt therapy--and a moral compass for many in the burgeoning counterculture of the '60s. "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 (read by Garrison Keillor and Edmund White); 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/producer Jonathan Lee and producer/editor Kimberly Reed (Prodigal Sons) have woven together a rich portrait of an intellectual heavyweight whose ideas are long overdue for rediscovery.

I suspect that he would have approved of Mr. Lee’s film, and not only because it approves so unreservedly of him. “Paul Goodman Changed My Life” may not have that effect on every viewer, but it has a passionate, almost prophetic sense of the impact that a writer and thinker can have on his times and the future.