Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap Box

What eco-friendly consumer hasn’t wondered about the man behind Magic Soap, that all-purpose cleaner famously bottled with rambling pantheological treatises? Remarkably, his tale—as told in Sara Lamm’s modest yet moving doc—outweirds fiction. The film features archival sitdowns with both the late Bronner, a soap-maker-cum-stump-preacher who fled Nazi Germany, and his progeny, who both sustain the patriarch’s business and preach his Moral ABCs. Lamm smartly shades the film with accounts of Bronner’s deadbeat dad–dom, providing a disturbing caveat to the good doctor’s cuddly countercultural image.