‘Howl’ movie review: James Franco in beat poet biopic of Allen Ginsberg

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…

Howl the movie is, or tries to be, many things: a faux-documentary narrated by Allen Ginsberg (played by James Franco), a biographical re-creation of important scenes in Ginsberg’s life, a courtroom drama about the infamous obscenity trial brought against Ginsberg’s poem Howl, and an animated interpretation of Howl set to a Franco reading. 

At a brisk 75 minutes without credits, Howl doesn’t really do justice to any of these elements, nor does it come together as any kind of cohesive whole, but there’s a lot of wonderful stuff going on here.

Best are the animated sequences: not because of the animation, but because of Franco’s reading of the poem, which is the most thoughtful and evocative version of Howl that I’ve heard. 

Franco never disappears into the role of Ginsberg (and the narration frequently veers into Freaks and Geeks‘ Daniel Desario territory), but the actor’s passion for the work is palpable. It’s cut up and organized in snippets throughout the movie, but would be more powerful if cut together and viewed in sequence.

And possibly set to something else. I say that because there are a lot of good ideas behind the rapidly evolving animation, but the 3D CGI effects frequently feel bland and ordinary and lack personality. During these sequences, I was most reminded of The Wall, with the Pink Floyd music replaced by a beautiful rendition of Howl; but that film’s imagery had an artistic value that is missing here. A Bruce Bickford could have done wonders with the material.

Also great are the courtroom sequences, which take up a surprisingly large portion of the screen time (Ginsberg himself is absent during these scenes). Jon Hamm (AMC’s Mad Men) is publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s defense attorney, David Strathairn is the prosecutor, and Bob Balaban is the level-headed judge; Jeff Daniels, Mary Louise-Parker, and Treat Williams play expert witnesses. The characters are barely sketched, but Hamm (Don Draper as a lawyer), Strathairn (in full Edward R. Murrow mode), and Balaban are impressive.

Most impressive, however, is the way the potentially salient obscenity trial is handled by directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. I was shocked to see Strathairn’s prosecutor and Daniels’ prosecution witness given a fair shake, painted as men who don’t want to burn books or ban material of potential artistic merit, but as men who simply have a different interpretation of the law. The low-key realism of the courtroom scenes add to their power.

The rest of the film deals with Franco’s Ginsberg: he narrates his life story to a recorder, and individual, important moments of his life are recreated for us. These scenes are fine – and an understanding of Ginsberg himself aids greatly in an interpretation of Howl – but ultimately feel biopic ordinary, the safe route to go, employing a style that is usually used in longer films that can better accommodate bulky narrative devices.

Documentarians Epstein and Friedman (The Celluloid Closet) seem to be less focused here than they ought to be, bouncing around between different styles and stories without a consistent narrative to drive through each of them. And while Howl doesn’t quite live up to the potential of Ginsberg’s poetry, it’s a wonderful primer.

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Jason Pirodsky

Jason Pirodsky has been writing about the Prague film scene and reviewing films in print and online media since 2005. A member of the Online Film Critics Society, you can also catch his musings on life in Prague at expats.cz and tips on mindfulness sourced from ancient principles at MaArtial.com.

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