True Vision 2014 recipient Amir Bar-Lev spent 15 years chasing down his bucket-list project: an era-spanning portrait of the iconic counterculture band the Grateful Dead. Unearthing rare film footage, audio recordings, photos and live tracks, Long Strange Trip makes a mind-expanding case for the band as a utopian, cosmic phenomenon. We are plunged deep into the band’s acid-test experiments as leader Jerry Garcia emerges as a humble but driven shaman raised on Beat poetry and Frankenstein movies and transformed by psychedelics. The band’s ambitions are visually expressed in the outlandish Wall of Sound, a concert rig that took nearly all day for its rogue pirate crew to assemble. Over the course of 240 glorious minutes, plus a short intermission, Bar-Lev delivers a miracle to make even nonbelievers grateful. (PS) The runtime includes a 20-minute intermission.