Howl review

Thirty years ago in John Byrum's soft-centred Heart Beat, John Heard played beat novelist Jack Kerouac with Nick Nolte as the legendary hippie car thief Neal Cassady. Both have minor walk-on roles in this dramatised documentary about the creation of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl", its first performance in a small San Francisco gallery in 1955, and the subsequent 1957 obscenity trial of its publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights bookshop fame. The movie is framed by an autobiographical monologue culled from numerous interviews with Ginsberg, performed with some conviction by James Franco, who expertly delivers extracts from the poem to the San Francisco audience. Interspersed are courtroom scenes in which Jon Hamm plays the liberal defence attorney, David Strathairn the perplexed, parodically square prosecutor (he anticipates Mervyn Griffith-Jones in the 1960 Old Bailey trial of Penguin Books for Lady Chatterley's Lover), and Bob Balaban the judge. The poem is accompanied by some strictly de trop animation in the manner of those stylised eastern European cartoons satirising social conformity that were once a staple of art-house movie programmes.

Howl was one of the first books I bought in America on arrival there as a graduate student in 1957. Not long after the trial I spent some time in San Francisco, where columnist Herb Caen had just coined the term "beatnik", and I can't think of the late 50s without lines from Ginsberg's liberating poem coming to mind. I also recall a 1958 New Yorker cartoon depicting an eager society hostess standing beside a scruffy, bearded young man in T-shirt and jeans at a cocktail party. A frosty, neatly attired literary intellectual is saying to her: "No madam. I do not want to meet a spokesman for the Beat generation."

I subsequently met three of the key figures who appear in the film and later discovered that all City Lights Pocket Poets books were printed around the corner from where I live in north ! London. So I should have been a pushover for this film. Sadly, I found it only moderately enjoyable and rather smug, much like an average edition of the BBC's Arena.


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