Beat Off

Howl

Directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman

Runtime: 90 min.

John Byrum’s 1980 Heart Beat is still the best film about the Beat era—from Lazslo Kovacs’ inspired color photographic evocations of Edward Hopper mythology to Nick Nolte, John Heard and Sissy Spacek performing the Jack Kerouac-Neal Cassady-Caroline Cassady triangle, and Ray Sharkey in a memorable cameo as Allen Ginsberg. But in the new Beat biopic Howl, James Franco’s now tiresome androgyny (so soon?) asks for wink-nod approval of Ginsberg’s hero status without adequately delineating Ginsberg’s personality or the emotional tensions of the late-’50s era.

Franco’s continued media assault exposes the directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s agenda-based drama. They all interpret Ginsberg’s landmark poem Howl, and the 1957 obscenity trial it provoked when Lawrence Ferlinghetti published it, as a contemporary political cause. The cause itself—proselytizing gay culture as an extension of Epstein and Friedman’s 1995 doc The Celluloid Closet— gets confused with Franco’s narcissistic attempt at being a dilettante.

One problem is: Franco’s media-pet status fights with Ginsberg’s own, and the filmmakers don’t focus the impersonation. When Franco’s Ginsberg recites, it’s from a bully pulpit. Most of Franco’s performance happens as a monologue in an interview context, speaking to an unseen interlocutor. It’s one-way acting that certainly worked for Franco’s memorably expressive loner role in Altman’s The Company, but misses Ginsberg’s connections with others (something the avid Ray Sharkey made clear).

Another problem is Epstein and Friedman’s ambition to avoid biopic conventions; they’ve conceived a meditative fantasia about Ginsberg, based on documentary material from the trial and quotes from Ginsberg’s poetry. Animated sequences pictorialize some verses (typewriting becomes musical notes; a cartoon of a Negro, the quintessential Beat avatar, plays jazz saxophone; Ginsberg’s erotic metaphors become phallic trees and sperm fireworks). This literalizing of poetry robs Ginsberg of his lyrical impact, as in descriptions of “homosexual joy” to which he gave “a rhythmic articulation of feeling.”

Attempts at making Howl an avantgarde film don’t fail as miserably as Fur (that abomination about Diane Arbus), but it isn’t lyrical or dramatic enough. (Trial transcripts re-enacted by sympathetic actors David Strathairn, Jon Hamm, Bob Balaban, Alessandro Nivola, Treat Williams, Jeff Daniels and Mary- Louise Parker simply announce a clique.) Considering what Epstein and Friedman were after, it’s too bad producer Gus Van Sant didn’t also direct in his obvious, though accomplished, poetic fashion. Van Sant would have known to at least keep Franco as flirtatious as he was in Milk.