Howl - The Movie

I want medals all around for those who are bringing us the movie Howl, already released in San Francisco, due in New York next week—I mean that tells you something right there, and I like it! Yes, this is a movie based on a poem—when was the last time you saw one of those? And it’s done real smart too—while they get most of the lines of Ginsberg’s classic into the film, they serve another purpose here, or several purposes, and a linear rendering just ain’t one of them.

The first purpose of the film is to set the scene at the Six Gallery reading, where Ginsberg first read “Howl” (October 7, 1955), and while it’s tough to pick out host Kenneth Rexroth and co-poets Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia and Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg is real, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady are too, and the scene just feels right in its black and white verisimilitude. And folks, you can thank James Franco for that. He is the young Allen. It’s uncanny, a miracle, full artistry... Kudos up the wazoos!

Allen was a generation or so older than me, so it’s not that I knew him when he was the brash young 30-year-old he is in the movie. But knowing who he was to become and having known him in the 1970s and onwards, I can imagine that the Franco character is real—and for me, imagination is a root for all art, poetry, acting, filmmaking. Franco’s performance brings this point home time after time. If you don’t believe me, close your eyes for a moment while you’re watching the film—you’ll swear you hear Allen talking. Franco looks like him too, uncannily—a super-smart, sly, big-hearted young man, totally full of himself and everybody else, too.

The obscenity trial makes up another section of this three-tiered flick, and it’s a hoot, done up in blazing Technicolor with some bravura performances. Jon Hamm is perfect as the brilliant defense attorney who’s really done his homework (there’s a terrific anti-censorship history lesson here) and David Straitharn limns subtlely the marvelously uptight prosecutor. Jeff Daniels is hilarious as a pompous professor from the University of Indiana who knows what poetry is, and Ginsberg it ain’t. A silent Lawrence Ferlinghetti sits next to his lawyer in the courtroom scenes—Poe’s Raven, silent, seething and right.

In the third section, the film opens up the poem into animation by Eric Drooker, inspired by his work with Ginsberg on Illuminated Poems (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1996). The film’s animation art has just been released in print form as Howl, a Graphic Novel which just came out in a gorgeous edition from Harper Perennial. (Compare prices to buy this beauty—the holidays are just ahead, folks!) It’s always risky to mix animation into a film, riskier to insert it in a full-length feature. And I’m all for taking those risks! The animated sequences are this film’s method to make the poem special—but you know it already is.

The archival footage is also wonderful. The lessons that we learned then we continue to learn—you’ll still get fined $10,000 if you read “Howl” on the radio!

The tag line of the movie Howl is: “The Obscenity Trial That Started a Revolution. The Poem That Rocked a Generation.” So grandiose. And so true! All I know is that the film as a whole is totally terrific, tells the stories accurately and well, and feels real. It’s an extraordinary achievement.