Howl

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night." So begins Allen Ginsberg's 1955 poem Howl, one of the most celebrated works of the Beat generation and perhaps the most famous American poem of the second half of the twentieth century.

Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have a made something of a collage of film about the poem, also called Howl, and for the most part it's engaging and informative. It's not really a narrative film. It's a docudrama, with three intertwining strands: an interview with Ginsberg (played by James Franco) conducted sometime in late 1950s; a trial that saw bookseller Lawrence Ferlinghetti charged with obscenity for selling the poem; and a recitation of the poem itself, by Franco, showing him at a 1957 reading. Much of it is accompanied by animation.

One's appreciation of the film is going to be based largely on one's appreciation for the poem, as it is the spine of the piece. It's hard to imagine anyone not liking it--the fuddy-duddy attitudes of the prosecution witnesses during the trial portion are yesterday's attitudes. The poem soars and swerves with jazz phraseology, alive with crackling syntax, and just enough crude sexuality to cause one to blush momentarily in pleasure. But I'm not sure the film says anything about Howl's legacy, or even its place in literary history. It's more of an opportunity to just let everyone who has never heard it before get a chance.

And that is important, because I find the poem is better heard than read. Franco, in both the recitation and interview segments, does a lovely job of inhabiting the fearfully insecure Ginsberg, who was futilely in love with both Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady (the standard-bearer of the Beat movement and his muse). Though Ginsberg was a visible figure for much of his adult life (he even was a witness as the Chicago conspiracy trial) he always struck me as a shy man, who thought he deserved to be in the shadow of men like Kerouac or William S. Burroughs.

The trial portion of the film, based entirely on court transcripts, has some big-time names: David Straithairn as the prosecutor, Jon Hamm as the defender, Bob Balaban as the judge, and Mary-Louise Parker, Treat Williams, Alessandro Nivola, and Jeff Daniels as witnesses. A lot of this is preaching to the choir, with those witnesses (Parker and Daniels) who don't believe the poem has any literary merit made to seem like square buffoons. The cross-examination of Daniels by Hamm, though well played, seems strange, as Daniels, as a University of San Francisco professor, makes bizarre statements, such as that if a poet borrows a form, the poem is not literature. If I were Hamm I would have asked if every sonnet written after the first guy did it was not literature.

Over the years there have been a few films made about the Beats: Heartbeat, about Keroauc and Cassady, Naked Lunch, about Burroughs, and now Howl, about Ginsberg. The one film that is yet to be made is the adaptation of Kerouac's On the Road, which I anticipate with both excitement and dread.

My grade for Howl: B+