A flower child reexamines his roots

''Should I tell you it was great?" says Ralph Arlyck in a scene from his new film, recalling his heyday in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. ''It was actually mixed, the way the present usually is."

Of course, the '60s turned out to be no radical picnic. The ideal of freedom collided with the need for stability. Free love led to broken families. Debates began about the value of work -- debates that remain unresolved today.

Such are the side effects explored by Arlyck's feature documentary ''Following Sean," which opens Friday at the Coolidge Corner Theatre.

The film is a follow-up to the 14-minute ''Sean" that Arlyck made as a graduate student in 1969. That black-and-white short profiled a 4-year-old named Sean Farrell and his hippie surroundings. ''I smoke grass," he says; his parents' crash pad is home to ''speed freaks" and gets raided by the cops. Because of Sean's matter-of-fact banter, it was a controversial but auspicious debut. It screened in New York with Francois Truffaut's ''The Wild Child." The White House showed it at a conference on children. ''Sean" came to symbolize what was both promising and terribly wrong about the counterculture.

''Following Sean" updates those myths -- and tries to topple them.

''I don't know that I had a sense [that it] was a historical moment," says Arlyck over tea at an outdoor cafe on Newbury Street, musing about where his mind was when he made the first film. ''But I must have known it was important."

He wears glasses and his mop of hair has gone silver, but at 65 Arlyck otherwise looks not so different from footage of himself as a budding filmmaker at San Francisco State University, using a skateboard to film Sean running around the Haight.

Feeling it was ''time to grow up," Arlyck left the Bay Area in 1970 with his French wife, Elisabeth Cardonne-Arlyck, and began a career as a documentarist and film teacher. He founded his production company, Timed Exposures, based in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and made films analyzing American culture: ''Current Events" examined people's response to shocking news stories, and ''An Acquired Taste" took on the nation's obsession with success.

If there is a common thread running through his films, Arlyck says, it's ambiguity. Arlyck is drawn to nonlinear plots and rough edges, and repelled by stories with a central point.

''The ambiguities of life are very rich," he says. ''I don't think films need to have a resolution or be inspirational."

Despite his feelings about resolution, Arlyck always wondered what had happened to the precocious Sean. So in 1994, he launched what turned into a 10-year project to track down Farrell and again film his life. Had Sean paid the price for his parents' playing with freedom?

''I was taking an awful risk," Arlyck says ''I didn't know what he'd be like, or how he'd dealt with what life had thrown him."

The adult Sean Farrell has a deadpan demeanor and looks somewhat like Russell Crowe. ''I was a bit surprised about how candid I was with him," says Farrell, 41, now an electrician living in San Francisco. ''I wasn't worried he'd misrepresent me."

In the circuitous film, which includes most of the original black-and-white short as flashback, Arlyck connects his life to Sean's. Both married immigrant wives, and both families had links to activism (though Arlyck's East Coast parents only dabbled in radicalism). The narrative ends up being as much about the filmmaker's history as it is about Sean's.

Arlyck doesn't shy from including his own family in his work, either. ''You going to use this in a movie?" barks his then-adolescent son in one scene, obviously accustomed to being observed and recorded.

What emerges in ''Following Sean" is a two-family, bicoastal, multigenerational portrait of American utopian ideals. ''One of the things that the film illustrates is that there is no complete freedom," Arlyck says. ''I think Sean feels that very strongly."

But this theme wasn't apparent until later. ''I never really knew what the film was about until I saw it," Farrell says by telephone while his son, Alex, 9, plays in the background. ''While he was making the film, I had no idea how he'd make the film interesting. I have a pretty normal life."

Watching the film, Farrell says, was cause for reflection. ''[It] made me feel more of a difference between my life and my son's life."

But how did a director averse to artificial closure know the project was over? ''Usually a film is over when it has to be over," Arlyck says, citing external pressures like a festival deadline or financial barrier.

In the case of ''Following Sean," a happier accident presented itself. The movie ends when Alex reaches 4, the age Sean was in the original film.

Ethan Gilsdorf can be reached at ethan@ethangilsdorf.com.