RAM DASS FIERCE GRACE
Portrait of the hippie guru.
Running time: 93 minutes. Not rated (nothing objectional). At
Film Forum, Houston Street, between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street. Through March 12.
THE documentary “Ram Dass Fierce Grace” opens with footage of the animated, bearded, long-haired hippie guru in his prime during the 1960s.
It leads to shots of Ram Dass today – beardless, white-haired, struggling to get out of a car, struggling to speak, unable to move his right arm.
The startling transformation is the result of a nearly fatal 1997 stroke (“I’ve been stroked,” is how he puts it).
Director Mickey Lemle then gives us a loving portrait of the man he has known for 25 years.
Born Richard Alpert, a member of a prominent Boston family, Ram Dass first made headlines in 1963, when he and fellow Harvard professor Timothy Leary got the sack because of their psychedelic experiments.
Alpert traveled to India, where his life was changed forever by a Hindu holy man named Maharajji.
In was in the foothills of the Himalayas in 1967 that Alpert took the name Ram Dass, which means “Servant of God.”
He returned to the United States, where he preached about his new spiritual path and wrote the best-selling book “Be Here Now.”
The most touching part of Lemle’s film concerns the 69-year-old Ram Dass today, as he struggles through physical therapy to regain control of his body while continuing to preach to his devoted followers, both young and old.
Refusing to let his physical condition get him down, he looks on the bright side: “There are qualities of me that would never have come out [without the stroke]. I’m at peace more now than I have ever been.”