Jamie (Michael Cera) is an American traveling in Chile. At a drug filled party with his friend Champa, he meets a spirited Crystal Fairy (Gaby Hoffmann). Jamie and Champa go on a road trip with 2 friends to take mescaline from the San Pedro cactus. They find Crystal trying to pay some women with 2 drawings of fairies. Crystal is a real hippie. Champa takes her on the trip. Jamie would rather leave her behind while he obsessively searches for the new high.

Jamie is selfish and a little bit annoying. Crystal is a flighty hippie. The two actors are likable personalities which keeps the unlikeability of the characters to a minimal. This is a hazy unstructured road trip hell bent on getting a specific high. Jamie is an obsessive character. It's interesting to see Michael Cera in this role. The story is a bit light weight until the serious ending.

Maybe you have to have been on a trip (both kinds there is/are),to really fully appreciate some of the things portrayed here. But I do believe that should not be a criteria to judge a movie by. Let's take Easy Rider for example. That movie is psychedelic and it knows it. It also has the muscle and acting power behind it to carry it along the way (talking about the original not the sort of sequel that came out recently of course).

But this? If you really look hard you might spot a message and yes there is weirdness. But if you want weirdness, just open your eyes and go outside. There is enough of that going around. You just have to open your mind (and you don't need enhancing drugs to help you with that) as well as your eyes. Go visit nature and take it all in, instead of sort of having someone trying to recreate that in a manner that just doesn't work

Michael Cera goes a long way toward changing his lovable doofus image in this road trip movie with a laid back and ultimately rather sweet vibe.

Cera plays an obnoxious American vacationing in Chile who's trying to chase down a special kind of cactus that has mind-altering capabilities when the juice is distilled and drunk. Along for the ride are three native Chilean brothers and another American, a hippie-dippie girl named Crystal Fairy. The Chileans are quiet, polite and tolerant while the Americans are both unpleasant, Cera because he's a jerk and Crystal Fairy because she tries too hard. If this had stayed yet another Americans-behaving-badly movie I wouldn't have liked it. But it goes a very different, and welcome, direction, as the group's time together causes defenses to be relaxed and vulnerabilities to emerge.

"Crystal Fairy" does a great job of capturing that unique dynamic that evolves when a random assortment of people spend a lot of time together on a road trip. The characters created by Cera and Gaby Hoffman (who plays Crystal Fairy) certainly aren't pleasant to spend time with for much of the film's running time, but they're so like people I've actually known that it's fascinating to watch their performances and how thoroughly they can create characters that feel so authentic.

I was already won over by the film's casual, relaxed atmosphere by the time the last few scenes came around, and then, after a late-act revelation and the sensitive way in which the film handles it, decided that I had sort of fallen in love with it.

Grade: A