A film about the origins of the Beat Generation, with
adolescent Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg getting up to all
sorts of naughty pranks in 1940s New York. Lots of drugs and booze, some
vandalism and sneaking into the library at night to substitute rude books like
Ulysses and Tropic of Cancer for the university’s recognised canon in glass
cabinets. Oh what fun they had!
It all goes a bit wrong when a gay love triangle ends in a
brutal stabbing murder, but it works out OK
for our three hipster heroes, who
are bailed out by their parents (or in Kerouac’s case, his fiancée), and even
for the murderer himself who gets off on the hilarious defence that his victim
was a homosexual predator, and so the stabbing was in “self-defence”.
I’m being a bit unfair, but this wasn't all that good.
Daniel Radcliffe is sort of all right as a moody Ginsberg, and there are lots
of smouldering looks between him and his not-quite-gay lover, but it’s hard to
take a rebellion against metre and rhyme, and based on cutting up books, very
seriously.
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