Trent Eglin

The Incredible Dog Act Trent Eglin

1967. Isaac Holdt, a promising second-year medical student, scores his first cap of LSD from Peyote Bill, a fugitive hippie dealer with the feds always three days behind him. The acid's alkaloid molecules further corrode an already crumbling foundation of ambition on which Isaac had been planning to build a life. It doesn't help that his girlfriend, a refugee from an abusive teen-marriage, has left town to reclaim her son from her own parents who'd deemed her an unfit mother, presumably because she couldn't take a punch. Drawn into a risky anti-war protest, equally grisly and inspired, Isaac realizes that the institutions under threat from him and his fellow students are now threatening him back. It seems the only people making sense to him are revolutionaries and mystics, and Isaac is beginning to question whether he'll be able to squeak through school before the comfy world where his childhood dreams were shaped completely unravels and he right along with it. Anyone looking for a slice of the '60s beyond the stock adolescent freak show in Indian drag, up to its love beads in irony, should enjoy this highly original and wryly humorous depiction of one of those rare cracks in the momentum of American history when basic assumptions lay exposed for serious ? sometimes even reckless ? reexamination, this time set to a thumping soundtrack.