Rating: 13/20
Plot: Details the infancy of the beat generation with Allen Ginsberg's first year in college and his meeting with Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, and Williams S. Burroughs.
I wish this movie was a little better since I'm interested in the subject matter. I enjoyed elements and thought the movie was dreamy enough. There were interesting montages with backwards gibberish, Harry Potter furious masturbating, running as writing, backward walking, and jump cuts, but that kind of stuff got tiresome after a while. The storytelling and the performances, both sometimes really good, are frustratingly inconsistent. Radcliffe's fine as Ginsberg for the most part although he's a little distracting. It's going to take more than butt sex for him to shake his cloak of invisibility. Dane DeHaan is good as Carr, but the character is so unlikable. I did like how he said "cock" though; with those beats, it was all about cocks, wasn't it? I did like Jack Huston's Burroughs a lot. His first scene has him lying in a bathtub with some kind of gas mask. Huston had the inflections and rhythms of Burroughs down, at least sometimes. "The words. Oh, the words." David Cross plays Ginsberg's dad, and it's kind of hard for me to take the guy seriously. One thing that bugged me is that a modern song pops up in the middle of all the cool jazz and breezy experimental stuff. It would have fit perfectly if this was just any contemporary coming-of-age story with noncomformist themes, but needed to feel more consistently like the 1940's and didn't always succeed. Those themes and the early emphasis on tradition and form are all a little heavy-handed, but it would have been the type of stuff I would have eaten up in high school. There are a lot of moments in this that almost work (a message from a professor, for example), but they only almost work which makes the whole thing feel a little incomplete. This is almost exactly as good as the other Ginsberg movie Howl with James Franco playing the author of the titular poem, and that movie was just almost-good, too.
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