Yes. Not that one was, but that one wanted to think of oneself in such terms. You wanted to steal the family car and drive all night and into the burning sun, driven by caffeine, and drive without stopping directly to City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, and have Lawrence Ferlinghetti publish your poems, which you would have scribbled on legal pads on the seat next to you as you drove.
The film "Howl" evokes the first tender birth of that new age. Its Beats still wear jackets and ties. Allen Ginsberg has horn-rimmed glasses and seems touchingly young, and not at all an angelheaded hipster destroyed by madness. The secret was: He wanted to be one, too. As the film gently reveals, he was reluctant to have his great early poem published, because he wasn’t eager to have his daddy find out things about him, such as that he was homosexual.
In years to come, Allen Ginsberg would play the role of Public Poet as Robert Frost had for an earlier and much different generation. He was Out when other brave souls were still only opening the closet door and waving. At a National Student Congress, I saw him sit cross-legged on a rug and use finger cymbals and chant whatever it was he was chanting, because the act and not perhaps the words seemed to be the point.
What feels right about "Howl" is that it is set before those days, before the beard and the mysticism and Tibet and the public persona and the levitating of the Pentagon. The bold, outspoken man of later days is seen here as still a middle-class youth, uncertain of his gayness, filled with the heady joy of early poetic success, learning how to be himself.
The film is above all about "Howl" the poem. Ginsberg, played by James Franco with restraint and care, reads it as smoke fills a 1955 coffeehouse. There is a re-creation of an early Ginsberg documentary interview. We see scenes from the poem’s trial for obscenity, with David Strathairn for the prosecution and Jon Hamm for the defense. (As ludicrous as some of the testimony is, it must be noted it’s word-for-word from the transcript.) There is an uncertain attempt to animate some passages from "Howl," based on the miscalculation that the poem’s striking imagery needs visuals, not words, to be realized.
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