As more than one wag has put it, there were something like “300 people” who made the “Swinging Sixties” era in London swing. But for all the complaining about “Boomer nostalgia” in describing that watershed age, bloody few of the folks who drove the Western culture sea change that era is famous for were post-World War II baby booomers.

Michael Caine (born 1933) became a film star in that decade. He was at the center of the action, one of those “300 people” singer/model/actress and former Mick Jagger lover Marianne Faithfull (born 1946) reminds him in the charming, immersive historical documentary “My Generation.”

The film’s conceit is simple. Have Caine, then 84, sit down with his Swinging London contemporaries — Roger Daltrey of The Who (born 1944), Paul McCartney (born 1942), Faithfull, Eric Burdon of The Animals (born 1941), fashion designer Mary Quant (born 1930), model and icon of the age Twiggy (born 1949), photographer of the era David Bailey (born 1938) and singer Lulu (born 1948).

They tell their story and “the” story of that time and place — what led to it, what came from it and what it was like to be in the middle of that social and societal whirl.

“My Generation” is part Sir Michael memoir, part history of a transformational decade and all about class and a generation that broke through staid, classist Britain’s “literal black and white” post-war gloom to liberate the possibilities of their lives.

Sir Roger Daltrey recalls seeing Elvis on 1950s TV.

“For the first time in my life, I’d seen someone who was ‘free.'”

McCartney and Burdon back that up and provided the soundtrack (along with The Kinks and Cream). Faithfull and Caine ruminate on how a better “free education” “set us up for the ’60s,” as she puts it. And designer Quant spent her 30s picking the colors and raising the hemlines of the age, with the stick-thin Twiggy as model and role model to all.

Caine’s jovial chats with one and all — every one of them off-camera so that director David Batty and his editors could fill the screen with news footage, archival interviews with “The Establishment” of the age and Jagger, among others cut into a blur — set the tone. Here are pop culture figures from “their” era, chummy back then and chummy in their dotage.

Caine remembers dropping into Liverpool’s Cavern Club over lunch while on tour with a play at catching The Fab Four before they were Fab, inviting Sir Paul to share his version of the working class accents that wouldn’t hold the Beatles back.

For Caine, it was all about breaking the class barrier, Cockneys cutting around the bowler-hatted gatekeeper/stiffs of “my parents’ generation” to rise as high as their talent and ideas would take them. Most of those he interviews have similar working class-to-riches stories. But not all.

It’s no surprise that Caine makes a light-hearted tour guide, as he laughs as easily as any celebrity of his generation. He jokes about photographer Bailey’s early interest in “birds” — the flying ones, not the ladies they chased in the sexist argot of the day. He chuckles at Faithfull and singer Donovan’s recollection of “the first” big drug busts and its conspiratorial, Establishment orchestrated repercussions.

“It’ was like one of your (spy) films, Michael,” the posh-accented, well-educated Faithfull jokes.

Director Batty incorporates lots of clips of archival Caine interviews from his earliest years of success, where British news producers would take him back to the old neighborhood, meeting former neighbors still there, the fish market where his father worked, reminiscing to U.S. chat show host Merv Griffin about the “accent barrier” he and contemporaries like Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay erased.

And there’s a lot of footage of Caine in screen star mode — clips from his films, showing him walking down those same streets in his prime and in character in “Alfie” and other movies. The producers here put Caine behind the wheel of an Aston Martin (he drove one in “The Italian Job,” when he wasn’t behind motoring in a Mini Cooper) to have him drive around the London of today.

The film can be faulted for being sentimental and perhaps self-aggrandizing. It’s also too monochromatic for its own good. Racial liberation came to Britain later, but as director Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” reminded us, there were plenty of Black, Asian and Caribbean people in the country and in London, some of them — like Ben Kingsley — starting to make their marks in the Swinging ’60s.

But if you’ve never read one of Caine’s lighthearted memoirs — which read the way he comes off in interviews (I’ve had the pleasure a few times) — “My Generation” is a treat, one Cockney’s rise above his circumstances, a tale that encompasses class, casting luck, a “Caine Mutiny” whim (how his name became “Michael Caine” and not “Maurice Micklewhite”) and an era that he was very lucky to have been born in time to live through.

Rating: TV-PG.

Cast: Michael Caine, Marianne Faithful, Lulu, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Twiggy, Roger Daltrey, Donovan, David Bailey, Joan Collins, David Puttnam and Mary Quant.

Credits: Directed by David Batty, scripted by Dick Clement and
Ian La Frenaiso. An IM Global/Lionsgate release on Tubi, other streamers,

Running time: 1:25