Bringing It All Back

The first line of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl� is one of the most famous in 20th-century literature: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.�

  It’s also one of the most parodied.

   Google the first few words and you’ll find that the best minds of our generation have been destroyed by a number of things including Twitter, excess facial hair and, yes, Google. The film “Howl,â€� starring James Franco as Ginsberg, goes back to the source to identify the power behind the poem and place it in its rightful spot in history.  And if it plays a bit like a (very colorful) history lesson instead of a drama, no matter: Franco’s superb performance, along with Ginsberg’s poem itself, makes it well worth watching.

   It’s not exactly a biopic. It’s as much the biography of the poem as the poet. The script is composed entirely of records from the time: transcripts of the obscenity trial of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who published “Howl;â€� a lengthy interview Ginsberg gave describing his evolution as a young poet and the scenes from his life the poem describes; and “Howlâ€� itself, read aloud by Ginsberg in a small San Francisco coffee house. 

   The trial scenes, though enjoyable, have little suspense. The prosecutor, played by the always marvelous David Strathairn, is clearly baffled by the poem and out of his depth. A string of expert witnesses testify to its literary merit: for the defense, Alessandro Nivola, who declares that it was indeed a necessary artistic choice for Ginsberg to use sexually explicit language to describe the sexual feelings and experiences of himself and his friends, including Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac.  Jeff Daniels is a smug professor who has concluded “objectivelyâ€�  that the form and theme of the poem are derivative and worthless. Jon Hamm, looking like he just stepped out of a “Mad Menâ€� episode, is the defense attorney who gets to make the impassioned plea for intellectual and artistic freedom to sum up the trial. And the movie.

   Speaking into a tape recorder, Ginsberg chronicles his uncertain and nervous beginnings as a middle-class college student desperate to impress his professor and role model Kerouac, and equally desperate not to upset his father, especially because he has realized that he is homosexual. But his early writings are criticised as false and inauthentic. He spends eight months in a mental institution, an eerie echo of his schizophrenic mother’s life, and then finds himself in an office job, until a psychiatrist urges him to quit and focus on poetry.   

   In one of the most interesting moments of the film he describes how he chose each word in a line with attention to the rhythm and juxtapositions of meaning. It wasn’t all stream of consciousness, but, rather, carefully crafted.  Even after the success and notoriety of “Howl,â€� Ginsberg wasn’t self-aggrandizing. As he says to his unseen interviewer — the beat poets didn’t see themselves as “angel-headed hipsters.â€�

   They were just a bunch of guys trying to get published.

   The weakest sections of the movie are the animations, even though they are based on Ginsberg’s own collaboration with the animator, Eric Drooker. The images, though often lovely, are literal and rarely surprising (lots of figures copulating and things that transformed into sexual organs). They distract from the words.

   After “Howlâ€� and the beatniks came the hippies, the anti-war movement, gay pride and so much more. Ginsberg was at the start of a cultural tidal wave that is still crashing around us. The movie succeeds in reminding us how fresh and new and surprising the poem — now enshrined in the course outlines of stuffy professors everywhere — was back in 1955, and that is a worthwhile endeavor indeed.

   “Howl,â€� rated R for adult language is playing at the Triplex in Great Barrington.