One of the many small pleasures of "Eden," a drama set at a New England preparatory school for boys in 1965, is that it gets the flavor of the era exactly right. Only one student at Mount Eden Academy, a proudly buttoned-down institution, has started growing his hair long and stumblingly incorporating into his vocabulary what will evolve into standard hippie argot.

Dave Edgerton (Sean Patrick Flanery), a nearly failing student with a first-rate mind, is a budding rebel whose personal reading list is headed by Richard Farina's "Been Down So Long It Looks Up to Me.” Dave also has an undisguised major crush on Helen (Joanna Going), the wife of his 29-year-old housemaster, Bill Kunen (Dylan Walsh). An attractive, brusque can-do mother of two, Helen, who walks with a leg brace, is striving hard to ignore the fact she has multiple sclerosis.

When "Eden," which was written and directed by Howard Goldberg, is portraying the regimented, unabashedly elitist world of Mount Eden, its affectionate remembrance of a puritanical WASPy milieu entrenched in the certainty of its own superiority is accurate down to the smallest details of clothing, furniture and tweedy, gentlemanly deportment. By contrast, a film like "Dead Poets Society," set in the same milieu, seems overwrought to the brink of hysteria.

In showing Dave's metamorphosis over a period of months from teen-age malcontent to budding counterculturalist, "Eden" refuses to romanticize his rebellion. His outbursts to his teachers and his naive delvings into psychedelia should remind all baby boomers of their first uncomfortable gropings into the forbidden world of drugs and their clumsy early attempts to acquire a hip facade.

In observing a marriage that is losing its bloom while being further undermined by the prevailing sexism of the era (Bill is adamant in his insistence that Helen stay more at home and do less tutoring), "Eden" unerringly locates the deeper anguish beneath the Kunens' tense marital squabbles.

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