Howl: From a howl to a drone

James Franco as Allen Ginsberg in a scene from Howl.JOJO WHILDEN

The best thing about the film Howl is the poem Howl. Allen Ginsberg's 1955 poem, spoken aloud in long-breath-length bursts by James Franco as the 29-year-old Ginsberg doing the first reading of the work, at San Francisco's Six Gallery in 1955, forms the spine of the film by documentary filmmakers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman.

The poem comes alive, with all its pyrotechnical pop of the language, and its mixture of anguish and joy, as an account of mental patients, drifters, homosexuals and drug addicts living on the underbelly of fifties conformity.

The second-best thing is the performance by Franco. Though he neither looks nor sounds like Ginsberg, he captures the poet's fragility and generosity.

Much of the film is given over to a direct-to-camera interview (based mostly on one unpublished interview) with Ginsberg. It is illustrated by black-and-white flashbacks describing the poet's journey to creating Howl, his unhappy crushes on handsome straight men, Jack Kerouac (Todd Rotondi) and Neal Cassady (Jon Prescott).

We also see the cruelties of 1950s psychiatric medicine and Ginsberg's struggle to find honesty in his poetry and his sexuality.

At intervals, Howl tunes down to a drone, like when we are plunked into the midst of the 1957 obscenity trial of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose City Lights Publishers published the poem. The cast who perform the trial's transcript includes Mad Men's John Hamm as the cool defence lawyer and David Strathairn as the clueless prosecutor (who memorably describes Howl as "tender B.S.").

Among the literary experts, we have Treat Williams, Jeff Daniels, Alessandro Nivola and Mary-Louise Parker, who testify before the square-but-fair judge (Bob Balaban).

If the court material at least provides some historical interest, there's no good explanation for the filmmakers' other strategy, to bring the poem to life through recurrent animated sequences. The drawings, by Ginsberg's former illustrator, Eric Drooker, look like an awkward mixture of Pink Floyd's The Wall and Walt Disney's Fantasia. They are redundant, and often close to travesty.

So, how should you illustrate the phrase "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night"? Short answer: You shouldn't, especially when the poet has already painted the pictures for you.

Howl