Know Your Mushrooms

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The opening sequence of Know Your Mushrooms guides viewers through a forest full of effervescent starbursts, powerful vibrations of light and giant mushrooms encircled by bright pink halos. The Flaming Lips’ “Anything You Say Now, I Believe You,” an overture penned specifically for the film, stutters abruptly between strummed acoustic guitars and huge, blaring synth salvoes. The message sent by documentarian Ron Mann is abundantly clear: I hope you’re over the rough part of your trip, because it’s time for me to tell you what this fungus is all about, man.

Bad news, stoners. Questions like “Do mushrooms sustain the planet?” and “Do they come from a far away planet?” are stated and re-stated but never discussed in a meaningful way. Instead, the movie showcases the tripped-out musings of a handful of mushroom experts, none of whom volunteer anything beyond mildly interesting trivia and dead-end speculation.

The backdrop for the movie’s investigation is provided by Colorado’s Telluride Mushroom Festival, an annual gathering of fungus aficionados. From wild mushroom hunts to cooking demonstrations to a traditional parade down Main Street, Mann gives the audience an exhaustive tour of the gathering’s many facets.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of revellers — from passersby who are in way over their heads to seasoned drum circle veterans — are only profiled briefly. Instead, the director conducts the vast majority of interviews with two mushroom experts: the well-informed but spaced out Gary Lincoff and the bedraggled, minimally sympathetic Larry Evans. Festival organizer Art Goodtimes comes in a distant third for screen time, his absurdly awesome surname making his semi-coherent mushroom evangelism only slightly more tolerable.

There are some excellent moments, such as Lincoff’s entrancing description of his first magic mushroom trip. Describing a chance encounter with a stranger in L.A. who takes him home to a fridge full of drugs, the nerdy neophyte goes on to tell of his host’s transformation into a wolf and their trip through the roof, into space, to the Andromeda galaxy and back. Similarly priceless is Mann’s footage of one of Evans’s forays in search of the evening’s dinner (“You know, everyone will be spanked if they don’t find a chanterelle!”).

Nonetheless, the film’s informational content seldom goes far beyond the superficial. To make matters worse, Telluride scenes and archival footage are interwoven with annoying filler, such as the computer-generated “Fun With Fungi” trivia segments that attempt to be trippy but come off cringe-inducing.

Ultimately, Know Your Mushrooms struggles with its own identity. Too goofy and light-hearted to be genuinely interesting but too shallow and ham-handedly “stoner-friendly” to appeal to the incense and Animal Collective set, the end result is stuck in limbo.