Natalie Merchant, the singer and songwriter of “Hey Jack Kerouac” among other hits, thinks that one reads and is swept up by his novel “On the Road” when young because “You’re kid of wired for it in adolescence.”
The actor, sometime biker and onetime long road trip traveler Josh Brolin read Kerouac’s “On the Road” while young and says “I like the impact” the novel had on him “in hindsight.” You’ve got to be young to “get it” and surf its long sentences while tuned in to its wavelength. He won’t re-read it for that reason.
And comic and host of the Emmy winning CNN “Shades of America” series W. Kamau Bell sees “On the Road” as a fine candidate for “The Great American Novel,” with its restlessness, eagerness to explore and move on, exploration and passion for the “freedom” of always going “west, young man.”
Fans of the novel, academics and surviving friends of Kerouac highlight the engaging new documentary appreciation of that seminal “Beat Generation” writer, “Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of America.”
“Capote Tapes” filmmaker Ebs Burnough serves up a reminiscence of Kerouac’s time, life and career that’s more about those famous fans and the wide open vistas of that eternal “road” that Americans crave than a literal account of the man’s life and that one great novel the self-destructive alcoholic had in him.
We learn that Kerouac’s French-Canadian heritage made him an “outsider” who gravitated to other outsiders all his life, of his probable bisexual crush on manic traveling companion Neal Cassady and glimpse the formative WWII events that shaped him. He was in the Merchant Marine for a while.
But his life was far more complicated than anything here suggests.
We pick up on the misogyny, the Civil Rights Era savvy of the novelist’s views about the way Black Americans were treated in the Land of the “Free,” and the irresponsible, roaming no-visible-means-of-support lifestyle that Kerouac and a handful of postwar figures grasped for as the rest of America settled into 1950s conventionality, with its picket fences, good schools, mortgages and a Chevrolet in every driveway that didn’t feature a Ford parked in it.
And we follow what are meant to be three versions of that sort of modern, rootless “Nomadland” American — a New Orleans couple who sold their house to see the USA in their Mercedes van-home, a retiree with a camping trailer she and her dog tour America in and a Philly teen restless to get out of town, start college in Atlanta and get on with his real life.
Interesting as these people are, not all of those analogies work or fit the role Burnough tries to give them here.
News footage of the day, a famous appearance on “The Steve Allen Show” and even home movies of Kerouac help recreate the milieu and the handsome writer in it. Kerouac’s onetime girlfriend, the writer Joyce Johnson notes that for all the restlessness Jack “always had a destination in mind” when he set out on his famous road trips. The trips were adventures. It was just that the “destinations” that let him down.
Jazz man, Kerouac pal and keeper of the flame David Amran helps flesh out the portrait. A Kerouac biographer who met Kerouac in his final years offers insights into the self-destruction. And the novelist Jay McInerney — whose “Bright Lights, Big City” was a sort of ’80s generational snapshot inspired by Kerouac’s example — talks up the quality of the prose and the “myth” of how “authentically” the novel was researched (essentially Kerouac transcribing road trips with assorted real life characters, some made famous by the book) and how quickly the novel was written on speed and typed onto a roll of teletype paper — which overwhelm the craft and quality of the prose.
And one Gen X wag appearing here repeatedly refers to the “1957 America” Kerouac was depicting in the novel, when he wrote the damned thing in ’51 about events covering the very late 1940s. When the book was published in ’57, the Beats were on the verge of being figures of nostalgia, Kerouac himself was a high mileage 35 year-old and the roads, the jazz/Slim Gaillard/New York-New Orleans-San Francisco “scene” captured on his pages were already out of date.
But that made the novel timeless the moment it finally hit print.
Reviewing the film as a journalist who had “The Kerouac House” beat for a time in Orlando, where Kerouac wrote “The Dharma Bums,” I could appreciate the slick, brisk, fanboyish treatment that “Kerouac’s Road” gives its subject. It’s an entertaining overview.
But the Obama White House alum who directed it goes a bit too gaga for celebrities, even if Kerouac fan Matt Dillon has a pretty good bead on what sudden “fame” could do to a struggling writer who finally makes it.
“It’s not like a perfect book,” Dillon says of the Benzedrine-fueled road narrative. “But here we are, all these years later, talking about it.”
Mixed bag or not, films like “Keroauc’s Road” feed on the novel and the novelist’s mythology. And when they’re on their game, they get at what Kerouac’s sensory-overload novel tapped into that is quintessentially American — mercurial restlessness, eagerness to live a life less ordinary and that core realization that staying in one place — even a New York, New Orleans or Los Angeles — is no way to get to where you want to go.
Rating: unrated, some profanity, gay and gender slurs
Cast: David Amran, Joyce Johnson, Natalie Merchant, W. Kamau Bell, Amir Staten, Jay McInerney, Diane Langley, Matt Dillon, and Michael Imperioli reading the words of Jack Kerouac.
Credits: Directed by Ebs Burnough, scripted by Eliza Hindmarch. A Universal Pictures release.
Running time: 1:31
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