AUGUSTA – Johnny Farrell immersed himself in San Francisco’s hippie culture during the late 1960s, living in a 10-room Haight-Ashbury pad where drugs were plentiful and free love reigned.

But it was Farrell’s 4-year-old son, Sean, who became emblematic of that era because of a critically acclaimed documentary film that bears his name.

“I smoke grass,” Sean said.

“Do you?” said the filmmaker, Ralph Arlyck, as film rolled. “What’s it like?”

“If you have any grass,” the 4-year-old answered, “I’ll show you.”

The documentary “Sean” was the talk of film festivals and was shown at the White House. To some, Johnny and Sean became symbols of an overly permissive and ultimately destructive lifestyle.

But Johnny says he wasn’t bothered by the criticism.

“I was as good a father as I could be,” he told the Kennebec Journal on Thursday. “I paid attention to him. And I listened to him.”

Johnny, now 67 and living in a one-bedroom apartment in Augusta, is again starring in an Arlyck documentary, a film playing this weekend at Railroad Square Cinema in Waterville.

“Following Sean” shows what became of the precocious little boy and his hippie father, who at age 30 walked away from a high-paying job and home in San Francisco’s suburbs to embrace a new lifestyle.

“It’s clear,” Arlyck says in the film, “that Johnny just never accepted the basic organizing principle of adult life, which is that we should all spend most of our time doing what we don’t really want to do.”

Johnny’s son took a different path.

“Following Sean” introduces its audience to a pudgy 31-year-old, a seemingly well-adjusted electrician who is worn down by life’s frustrations and struggling to survive in expensive San Francisco. The film follows Sean through his 30s – through marriage, fatherhood and divorce.

“You work and you work and you work, and you never get ahead,” Sean says. “Every month, you’re $200 further in debt.”

“Following Sean” is, in part, an examination of American attitudes toward employment. Sean works hard so he can buy a home and things, but seems unhappy. Johnny avoids regular work and lives in an assortment of ramshackle trailers, yet seems content. After the film was made, he married a Mainer and moved with her to Augusta.

“I was never into the capitalist thing, owning property and all that,” Johnny said this week, sitting on his couch. “Owning land to me is like loading something onto your back.”

Johnny walked away from a home worth $500,000, leaving it without dispute to his wife. The film shows Sean ruefully staring at the house, which he would love to own, and shaking his head.

In his Augusta apartment, Johnny thinks about Sean’s hard-working lifestyle and also shakes his head. What became of the free-and-easy little boy he once knew?

“He’s a good man,” Johnny said. “He’s really good with his son. He’s just not good with himself.”

Johnny’s life has been nomadic. For many years, with Sean often in tow, he lived on a converted school bus he took to Mexico and all over the West. He has lived on communes. “Following Sean” finds Johnny living in a rural California motel, where he’s the handyman.

But Johnny has never felt more at ease, more connected, than when he lived in Haight-Ashbury during the 1960s. The neighborhood is his touchstone. He tells of drug-fueled parties hosted by the Grateful Dead, of seeing Janis Joplin on the street, of Jefferson Airplane playing in a nearby park.

His life hasn’t been easy or simple. He has been married five times and has eight children and 10 grandchildren.

“I don’t have definite formal opinions about Dad,” Sean says in the film. “I just have an overall feeling about him. And it’s actually not a bad feeling. I like him. I like him just fine.”

Johnny met his most recent wife in an online chat room. They make do on Social Security and split their time between Maine and California.

Johnny says he has no regrets about the lifestyle he chose.

“How many people can get up in the morning and decide what they want to do?” he said. “How many people can move wherever they want?”

Johnny hasn’t seen “Following Sean,” and doesn’t plan to watch it in Waterville. He doesn’t seem curious about how he is depicted.

He doesn’t dispute how he was portrayed in the first film, except for one important detail: He says Sean didn’t use drugs when he was 4, dismissing the claim as a little kid’s fantasy.

But otherwise the film captured Sean accurately, he said.

Some people watched 4-year-old Sean and were horrified. But Johnny remembers his young son and sees qualities he wishes Sean would return to.

“I think he’s a little uptight,” Johnny said. “He never was like that when he was little. He was freer.”