14A - Advisories: Crude Content and Coarse Language.

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.”

So starts HOWL, the epic poem by Alan Ginsberg that helped birth the Beat generation. The poem’s vivid descriptions of “angelheaded hipsters” and demons “whose eyes are a thousand blind windows” resonated with a nation that felt abandoned after the Second World War; but its sexually explicit (and often homosexual) content didn’t sit well with some members of the moral majority.

Much like Ginsberg, directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have cast off the tired conventions of their genre in this portrait of the writer. Rather than a typically melodramatic biopic, HOWL captures Ginsberg’s poem through four interweaving segments. In one, Ginsberg (played to perfection by James Franco) reads his poem to a packed poetry club. In the second, he recounts his life story in a candid interview. The third is a reenactment of the infamous HOWL obscenity trial, and the final one is a lushly animated recreation of the poem itself.

Based on real interviews and court transcripts, HOWL is Ginsberg in his own words. It’s a reminder of the power of language to inspire and to offend, and of the contant threat posed by censorship. Mostly, though, it’s a celebration of one of the great literary works of the 20th century.

PH