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| James Franco stars as Beat poet Allen Ginsberg |
Howl (2010)
Director: Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman
Cast: James Franco, David Strathairn, Jon Hamm, Mary - Louise Parker.
The movie is about the Beat generation and its philosophical foundations as much as 24 Hour Party People is about the history of the Madchester music scene. I always try to look for the basic, simple human story underneath heaps of rhetoric, plot and context and to me, 'Howl' is about finding an original voice in a world of cold, clinical machinery run by automatons drained of life blood. The story is the same in every decade. Rock and Roll followed by Beat followed by hippies followed by punk followed by Grunge and so on. The message is the same, it's of protest, just the figures change.
I have never seen Allen Ginsberg speaking in any documentary or footage before, so I am unacquainted with how he was like in real life. But James Franco gives such a lively, sincere and heartfelt performance that never for a second, I found it difficult to empathize with this lost, melancholic and loving character. Some critics, including Ebert criticized the use of animation to support Howl's (the poem I mean) visual imagery, but for ignorant noobs like us, for us common folk, I think it was a smart move on the makers' part - it allowed me to seep into the world of 1950's post World War trauma and empathize with the lost souls that Ginsberg wrote about in his poem. I am thankful that this film was made or else I would've never come to know about this great man and his mind.
