This is an enormously famous movie, one that has achieved iconic status.  That means it's great, right?  Well, not necessarily.  It's an incredibly amateurish and uneven flick, with gaping holes in the plot, in the dialog, in the editing.  The performances are (quite literally) stoned and dazed.  But in this birds nest of oddness there are enough true gems to put it firmly in the forefront of classic cinema.  These are the scenes we've all seen before: the famous "This used to be a hell of a good country" scene at the campfire comes to mind.  That soliloquy alone is worth the price of the DVD.  I think it all boils down to the fact that there is basically nothing worth getting too sentimental about from this time period.  The crazy crack pot adolescence of the American nation doesn't bear too much scrutiny or it becomes painfully obvious that if you weren't stoned, you didn't get it, and you won't get it now.  In other words, you have to believe it to see it.  I do believe some of it, sometimes, and this movie helps me glimpse that small part.  But it also shows me how painfully vaccuous and dreary and empty and pointless so much of the youth counterculture truly was.