Becoming Nobody

Maybe such artful deployment of technique goes against the simplicity that Ram Dass preaches-but it often makes for moving cinema.

Becoming Nobody will illuminate your inner cynic, especially since so much of what Dass teaches is borrowed so heavily from another culture.

There's nothing particularly innovative about the filmmaking, but "Becoming Nobody" does its job: helping spread Ram Dass' message in a polarized world in which we tend to emphasize our differences, not our similarities.

Still, if "Becoming Nobody" may dig only as deeply as the filmmaker and/or Alpert chose to go, it remains an inspiring, stirringly meditative portrait of one man's profound spiritual influence on a world that has surely needed him.

It ultimately feels like a missed opportunity, a labor of love that would have benefited from a little more objectivity.

Reveals a restless spirit, a man whose entire life is curriculum, dedicated to learning and teaching. Most of all, it's a chronical of someone who is always true to himself, wherever the road leads him.

It's all very deep, and one probably needs to be in the right frame of mind to take it all in.

Becoming Nobody is cinematic soup for one, as Catto's ladling the noodles only for himself.

A non-critical and unfocused but diverting documentary on the American academic who dropped out to become an influential spiritual teacher.

An interview with the renowned spiritual teacher on the really big questions of life.