I wasn't alive in the 1970s so I will never know what it was truly like, but to me this movie comes across like it's an exaggerated almost caricatural depiction of the time. But that's how I feel about movies from the 1980s and 1990s that are set in those decades too, because I actually remember what it was like to grow up then, and it was nothing like it was depicted in movies from those decades. Such depictions are always distorted in one way or another.