Directed by Curt Worden
At Clearview-Chelsea Theatres
Runtime: 97 min
The fact that Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur—a searing and unsentimental account of the author’s messy emotional and mental breakdown following the success of On the Road—has inspired so bald-faced a piece of hagiography as Curt Worden’s One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur is a choice irony. There’s nothing inherently bad about the documentary about the real-life events that eventually culminated in the classic; it’s just that there’s little revelatory in it either. If you go in thinking that Jack Kerouac was a troubled guy but one hell of a writer, that’s about all you’ll take out as well.
Worden traces the well-known trajectory of Kerouac’s post-On the Road career. Launched into the limelight and idolized as the voice of the Beat generation in 1957, Kerouac gradually grew cynical and disaffected by his own lionization. Feeling himself sinking deeper into alcoholism, he fled to friend and Beat poet Frank Ferlinghetti’s cabin in Big Sur to rest his mind and dry out his body. As anyone who has read Big Sur knows, though, this isolation brought a whole new kind of inner torment.
The line between historical fact and its fictional retelling is frequently traversed throughout One Fast Move: apt for a film about so unflinchingly autobiographical a novel. As friends of Kerouac—including Ferlinghetti and Carolyn Cassady, the wife of close Kerouac confidante Neal Cassady and object of Kerouac’s affection—discuss the events that became the book’s plot, artists ranging from Sam Shepard to S.E. Hinton to Tom Waits read from and reflect upon the novel and its impact on their lives. It’s no dig at the effect that Big Sur has had upon subsequent generations of writers, musicians, and others—Dar Williams’ tearful reading of a select passage is quite moving—to say that hearing people talk about why a book is great usually ends up meaning a great deal to the speaker and making the listener wish they could just pick up the damn thing and read it themselves. These heartfelt but increasingly repetitious testimonials to Kerouac’s genius outnumber the more-intriguing anecdotes from the writer’s social circle, as when Cassady wryly informs us that any amorous advances her character makes in Big Sur were actually initiated by Kerouac in real life.
One Fast Move often has a nice, shaggy-dog quality, as when Worden assembles multiple interviewees in a coffee shop or around a campfire and lets them riff about their relationship with Kerouac and Big Sur. Ultimately, though, his aesthetics feel redundant and occasionally pedestrian. This is one of those movies where someone reading about the ocean in voiceover is accompanied by pretty shots of…the ocean. Such moments are microcosms of the film as a whole: earnest, pleasant, utterly obvious, and kind of dull.
