Some roads are less traveled for a reason. Take Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, published in 1951. Ever since it made a literary splash, people have wanted to make a movie out of it. Kerouac wanted it to star himself and Marlon Brando as the charismatic Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady in real life); the project fell through.
Director Francis Ford Coppola acquired the book rights in 1979, and it languished in several script versions in Development Hell for decades until most people thought it was one of those urban legends, like Bigfoot or Mitt Romney’s Political Beliefs. Zoetrope, Coppola’s production company, eventually got Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) to direct a movie based on a book most thought was unfilmable.
I thought so, too. Kerouac’s novel is a flabby, shaggy thing. Lacking plot, it meanders from location to location. You read it as a young man and then move on — say, to other, more measured books in the Kerouac canon, like Desolation Angels. I found it more interesting as an introduction to Kerouac’s circle of friends, which included Allen Ginsberg (Carlo Marx in the book) and William Burroughs (the character Bull Lee). The exploits of the Beat writers during that decade from 1947 to 1957 were certainly more interesting than Kerouac’s breakthrough novel.
Still, Salles doesn’t do a bad job. It’s just that certain things, like Kerouac’s prose, belong on the page, preferably in a dog-eared copy of On the Road tucked into your knapsack or stuck in your back pocket. It’s a book to live by as a young man, not necessarily a cinematic experience.
Though the main actors — Sam Riley as Sal Paradise (Kerouac) and Kristen Stewart as road muse Marylou — do a credible job of playing the period before the Beats became a cultural phenomenon, it’s Garrett Hedlund (last seen in Tron: Legacy) who steals the show as Dean, a mercurial hustler who just wants to drive and drive and drive.
Hedlund has some good “hep cat” moments, vibrating his torso to Afro-Cuban bebop, smoking Mexican grass or balling Marylou and a string of other women that includes Kirsten Dunst. But what comes across on the pages of On the Road — the nonstop patter of Moriarty, a kind of running commentary on life’s every minute detail in passing — just can’t make the transition to the screen. Maybe it’s because a guy declaring his fascination with the soul of every passing stranger on the road would tend to slow the movie down somewhat. But Moriarty’s voice was the pulse behind On the Road. He was the reason Sal took to the road so often, looking for kicks in places outside of his mother’s apartment or behind his typewriter keys. Everyone, at some time, has had an acquaintance like Dean Moriarty: someone too crazy for everyday living. Someone who seemed to experience life directly through every single pore. Someone who burned out too early, or from too much. Moriarty/Cassady was Kerouac’s muse, and his literary spark. Kerouac, a Columbia student and football scholar before he dropped out, always had a writing career in mind; he was the fly on the wall to Cassady’s exploits — or so one gathered from reading On the Road.
That crazy voice, and the fibrillating chatter of the “mad ones,” as Kerouac calls them, was what really drove his breakout novel. To signal that On the Road was not just another Thomas Wolfe imitation, Kerouac wrote the thing nonstop on a roll of Teletype paper, threaded into his typewriter.
Some of that crazy spirit comes through in Salles’ film. Just not enough of it. It lumbers along, from one carefully lit Beatnik hovel to another. In truth, On the Road was probably considered unfilmable because it has no real plot: it’s directionless, episodic, dotted with small epiphanies and accidental poetry. Yet many a young man encountering its texture for the first time, the unique voice Kerouac had found, became inspired — either to find their own voice, write their own novel, or simply hit their own road to nowhere.
The movie, even in this modern age, hints at how shocking the Beats’ anti-material lifestyle must have been to that post-war generation. Dean, Sal and Marylou may dress like modern hipsters, with the fedoras and flannel shirts, but this is no Levi’s commercial: they snort Benzedrine (an available amphetamine at the time), sleep with whoever’s around, and in one memorable scene, tool down the highway buck naked, Marylou seated between the two dudes, offering her two hands to the cause of free love. Moriarty in particular is a character without rules or limits: a compulsive liar and charmer, he invites men, women, blacks, whites, etc., into his bed. He embodies what the Sixties would later come to represent, some 20 years before the fact. The episode with Bull Lee and his wife Jane on a Louisiana farm is even loopier: Viggo Mortensen (with his morphine drawl) and Amy Adams (with her Benzedrine twitch) provide the movie with a dose of genuine weirdness (no wonder their story ended in real life with “Jane” being shot dead by Burroughs in a failed game of William Tell. Also in real life, Cassady would have one more fling with literary fame before burning out: he would accompany Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters on their psychedelic road trip in 1966, more often than not shirtless, behind the wheel of the bus, spieling off an endless monologue about every passing bit of ephemera. The fuse to two literary voices would eventually die of an overdose near the El Paso railroad tracks in ‘69.)
Come to think of it, On the Road would make a good double feature with David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch. Some of the same characters appear, and there’s a shared theme of outlaw living as part of the necessary diet for literature. Only Ginsberg’s epic “Howl” has so far escaped the Hollywood casting call. Now, that really would be unfilmable.