he was very blessed to be sure... thanks HULU for another fine show...

This is an extraordinary movie that stays with you for days, or in my case, years. From my first viewing three years ago, up to today, I’m struck by how compelling filmmaker Bill Rose makes the story of Oakley Hall III – a burgeoning playwright and director whose rising star was tragically extinguished when he suffered a nearly fatal fall from a bridge in the late 1970s. Starting with friends, family and colleagues retelling Oakley’s “legend,” the film paints him as a sexy, charismatic “enfant terrible” who set aside his aspirations to be a novelist to start a scrappy, ragtag regional theater company in upstate New York. But there’s much more to the film than people putting on plays. Rose deftly suggests that Oakley was, from the beginning, trapped in a gilded cage of expectation (his father was the late Oakley Hall II, novelist of Warlock and The Downhill Racers).By the time his theater company is in full swing (with sex, drugs, and rock and roll in full evidence) there’s the sense that Oakley’s traded his “vision” for yet another set of obligations -- not just to his family and his own sense of accomplishment, but the hopes and dreams of the devoted members of his “company”. The honesty and candor in their interviews is consistently touching and sometimes surprising.Alcohol and drugs become a more prominent component, and the film creates a kind of ticking time bomb as Oakley’s pressures mount, and we fearfully wait for “the accident” we know is to come. When it does, it’s devastating.But what makes the film transcendent is what happens after that. It’s a surreal, magical moment as the subject of the documentary literally appears out of the mist, walking toward the camera as if resurrected, to become a key interview subject for the rest of the film. Hall survived the fall from the bridge, but suffered severe brain damage -– the effects of which are described by his friends and family, but also dramatically on view as he talks to the camera, sometimes quite cogently… sometimes not. There’s an odd disconnect, too, in the fact that even in his most addled moments, he continues to convey the charisma and sex appeal that charmed virtually everyone who knew him in the pre-accident days. In the final analysis, this is less a movie about a promising talent whose career was derailed than it is about a man who gave a group of people a sense of purpose and community that they -- judging from their interviews -- have never quite recaptured. Mostly, to me, it’s a film about redemption – as we watch Oakley trying (with decidedly mixed results) to reconcile his two selves, the man he was before, and the man he is now. For anyone who has ever taken a wrong turn in life, or been dealt a bad hand, or just wanted a second chance, this is a deeply touching, human story. I had never heard of Oakley Hall III or Bill Rose prior to seeing this film. But for me, it joins the Mayles’ and Ken Burns as being in the top tier of accomplishment in American nonfiction filmmaking.