Live From SXSW's Screening Room

GO FURTHER

Documentary Feature Special Screenings, World Premiere

If you've lived in Austin long enough, you've probably developed a healthy aversion to patchouli oil, wheat-grass shots, and other bastions of the aging/nouveau hippie set. That aversion is a legitimate reason to approach Go Further -- a road trip documentary promoting healthy living -- with some suspicion. But then you see the smiles, the cooing over avocado chocolate soufflé (no baking allowed!), and the genial prankster aesthete of all involved in the SOL (Simple Organic Living) bus tour, and you start to think ... I could get into this. It helps that director Ron Mann (Grass) has found in his friend Woody Harrelson, SOL's spearheader and an all-around good-times kind of guy (high times, too), an articulate and approachable subject who doesn't so much preach as enlighten. No, Go Further isn't an educational video: Mann's doc (beautifully shot on DV) may be instructive, but it is above all things funny. Suspicious minds find an easy entry point in busmate Steve Clark, a chain-smoking, gas-station-food junkie who wears a Natural Bowl Killers hat and looks like he just wandered in from the set of jackass the movie; Clark's gradual conversion to clean living is genuinely inspiring. Human-scaled, attainable, motivational, Go Further makes the case that "further" needn't seem so far after all. (Paramount, 3/14, 6:30pm)