Review: HOWL

“There is no Beat Generation,” poet Allen Ginsberg (James Franco) tells an anonymous interviewer in 1957. “Just a bunch of guys trying to get published.”

The original Beats, including Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs were indeed all writers, whose biographical and self-mythologising works directly inspired a countercultural movement that scandalised the USA in the staid 1950s.

The publication of Kerouac’s On the Road in 1957 was a key moment in Beat history, but the catalysing event which rocketed the Beats, Sputnik-like, to fame across the USA was the publication of Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems by San Francisco’s City Lights Press in 1956; and the court case the following year which saw its publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, charged with obscenity.

The trial was widely covered by the press, with articles appearing in both Time and Life magazine; and the decision by Judge Clayton W. Horn that ‘Howl’ was of “redeeming social importance” and was therefore “not obscene” was a significant landmark for freedom of artistic expression.

As writer Fred Kaplan noted in Slate, the court case was ‘serious business':

'If Ferlinghetti had been found guilty, Capt. William Hanrahan, the juvie chief who arrested him, was going to send his cops to sweep the filth from every bookstore in the city – he'd drawn up a long list of titles – and San Francisco, which was just emerging as an avant-garde haven, would have retreated into backwater provincialism for years, if not decades.’

In the hands of Academy Award-winning filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, The Celluloid Closet), the obscenity trial becomes the dramatic centrepiece of a new docu-drama that explores Ginsberg’s creation of ‘Howl’ and the poem’s lasting cultural impact as a transcendent work of 20th century literature.

Based on court transcripts and a 1957 interview given by Ginsberg, the film uses carefully orchestrated re-enactments and archival footage to capture the spirit of the times, and vivid animation to convey the poem’s dramatic imagery. Also interwoven throughout the film is a vivid recreation of Ginsberg’s first dramatic reading of ‘Howl’ at San Francisco’s Six Gallery on October 7, 1955; a night which Kerouac would later immortalise in his novel The Dharma Bums.

Set in 1957, both the trial – featuring Jon Hamm (Mad Men) as defence attorney J.W ‘Jake the Master’ Ehrlich and David Strathairn as the prosecutor, Ralph McIntosh – and the extended interview with a strikingly frank Ginsberg are shot in colour. Flashback sequences showing the creation of the poem and other key episodes from Ginsberg’s life are shot in crisp black and white.

The film leaps back and forth across its various timelines, with the hallucinatory animated images designed by artist Eric Drooker further complicating its narrative. The overall effect could have been dizzying and confusing; instead, like ‘Howl’ itself, the film is inspiring and ecstatic.

As the young Ginsberg, James Franco is brilliant, capturing the poet’s clipped and awkward speech patterns; his frustrated love for Kerouac (Todd Rotondi) and the “cocksman and Adonis of Denver,” Neal Cassady (Jon Prescott); and his lasting guilt over his mentally ill mother, Naomi, whose lobotomy papers Ginsberg had to sign at the age of 21.

The animated sequences are occasionally a trifle literal, but they also provide an emotional component which is otherwise absent from the film, particularly when illustrating parts II and III of ‘Howl’; and Beat Generation devotees will enjoy spotting scenes which the filmmakers have recreated directly from Ginsberg’s own photographs, such as Kerouac smoking on a New York fire escape, and Allen and his lover Peter Orlovsky (Aaron Tveit) sitting back to back, like one of Plato’s Children of the Sun reunited at last.

The film’s production design, by Thérèse DePrez, is detailed without being flashy, Jake Pushinsky’s editing is excellent, and Carter Burwell’s original music sensitively and generously compliments the action on-screen.

Cleverly cast and imaginatively made, Howl is a fitting testament to the power, beauty and passion of Ginsberg’s poetry, and a fascinating fusion of cinematic forms. At the time of writing it is showing on a single Australian screen, at Melbourne’s Cinema Nova, prior to a Madman DVD release later this year. It deserves a much wider audience.