On the Road is the faithful but ultimately unsuccessful movie adaptation of the seminal Jack Kerouac novel. The novel is itself primarily remembered as memoir of the Beat Generation’s defining literary voices, for its stream of consciousness narrative and for the unforgettable portrait of Keroauc’s muse Neal Cassady as the character Dean Moriarity. Director Walter Salles succeeds in creating a wonderful time capsule of the Beats – but that’s not enough.
The story is centered on the famous series of road trips where Keroauc latches on to the the charismatic and erratic Cassady, hoping that their adventures will unclog Kerouac’s writer’s block. Although he has some independent escapades, Kerouac is essentially the observer, unleashing Cassady on North America. Cassady had insatiable appetites for sex, Benzedrine, marijuana, nonstop talking and driving long distances at high rates of speed, and he was a pillar of unreliability. If Cassady is known for anything, it’s for his twitchy freneticism and speedy monologues. If you’ve read On the Road and especially if you’ve seen film footage of the real Neal Cassady, you’ll find the actor Garret Hedlund’s portrayal too measured. Except for one jazz party scene, it seems as if Hedlund has never witnessed the effects of amphetamines. Unfortunately, the Cassady character – the throttle for the novel – is the brakes to the movie.
The narrative is pretty linear. We are SHOWN stream of consciousness at the end of the movie when Kerouac bangs out On the Road on his single 120-foot roll of typewriter paper. But the movie has none of the novel’s helter-skelter flavor.
But if anyone knows how to direct a road movie, it’s Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries). Salles captures the long hauls across the vast continent and vividly depicts settings from gritty NYC to the never ending Nebraska plains. In one particularly nice touch, the characters enter San Francisco on a completely fog-shrouded Golden Gate Bridge, which Bay Area residents know to be a more typical experience than postcard weather on the Bridge.
The Keroauc character is ably played by Sam Riley, who has the less showy role of Kerouac’s cultural sponge.
Kristen Stewart plays Cassady’s 16-year-old bride; since she’s a big movie star, she gets more screen time than she gets pages in the book. That’s a good thing, because, despite all the grief she gets for the Twilight movies, Stewart can really act.
The surrounding cast is excellent. Tom Sturridge stands out as the young Allen Ginsburg. Alice Braga sparkles as the Mexican-American single mom that Keroauc picks cotton with. We glimpse Viggo Mortensen and Amy Adams as Beat figures William S. Burroughs and June Vollmer. Steve Buscemi is always welcome in a movie, and here he gets a creepy pencil-thin mustache. Kirsten Dunst and Elisabeth Moss do what they can with the roles of women scolding their unreliable men.
On the Road, with its fine secondary cast, is a leisurely tour through the Beat period, but without the energy of its pioneers.
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