It’s the ultimate hopelessness of the situation that made it hard for me to buy into the uplifting ending of the new political documentary Feels Good Man. There are a lot of emotional and intellectual nooks and crannies in the picture, and what resonated with me was the aforementioned hopelessness and an impotent rage at the callousness of other human beings. First time director Arthur Jones covers a lot of ground in Feels Good Man. He paints a personal portrait of an artist who has lost control of what his art means; he captures the zeitgeist of a singularly odious time at the intersection of American politics and culture; he provides a cogent exegesis for one small part of the 2016 presidential election. Jones’s film is an engrossing look at the power of the internet to shape the world that lies beyond the screen.
