(2010) "Holy the poem." Composed in 1955 - "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness" - an utterance of his soul he didn't expect others would hear or read ("who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York") certainly not his father or family, so he unfettered his feelings ("who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight/ in policecars for committing no crime but their/ own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication"), letting them loose as a breakthrough of homosexual joy ("who howled on their knees in the subway and were/ dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-/ scripts, who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly/ motorcyclists, and screamed with joy"), of complete honesty, of liberation that pronounced he could be "free to be frank about anything."

In scenes from 1955 (black-&-white) typing the manuscript and reading aloud when he was 29 and 1957 in New York City (color), Beat bard Allen Ginsberg (James Franco, who has enrolled in Yale's PhD English program) appears in two of the four intertwining threads that form directors/writers Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's documentary-like biopic of one of the 20th century's seminal poets, including archival footage, with all dialogue taken word-for-word from interviews, court transcripts, and the poem itself.

The other two strands are from the courtroom in San Francisco, with City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Andrew Rogers) on trial (while the author, absent and unindicted, resided in New York), accused of publishing an obscene book, Howl and Other Poems ("who were expelled from the academies for crazy &/ publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull") and an animation (inspired by Illuminated Poems by Ginsberg and Eric Drooker) of the poem's "rhythmic articulation of feeling." A sexual feeling with prophetic power - Job's cry as Ginsberg's howl - only to be understood a century hence.

Answering questions from an interviewer, Ginsberg unravels his life and the inspiration for the poem: "So what happens when you make a distinction between what you tell your friends and what you tell your Muse?" - his alienation and self-examination for being different; his having fallen in love with Jack Kerouac (Todd Rotondi), whom he wanted to "entrance" with his verses, opening up to his homosexuality; his association with Carl Solomon ("ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time") in the looney bin for eight months, followed by self-rejection and depression; hitchhiking with Neal Cassady (John Prescott), "secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy" - "The trick is to break down that distinction …"

Ginsberg tells of his meeting Peter Orlovsky (Aaron Tveit), with whom he felt for the first time "accepted in my life completely," but while working in the real world of commerce, he became caught in "a fear-trap" ("Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows") and entered into psychotherapy when his writing became blocked: "'What is your heart's desire?" … What I'd really like to do is just quit all this [to be with Peter and write] … 'Why don't you do it, then?'"

Witnesses during the trial for the prosecution - focusing on the vocabulary of "alcohol and cock and endless balls" - include English instructor Gail Potter (Mary-Louis Parker) - "I think it has no literary merit" with its crude language and lack of moral character - and Prof David Kirk (Jeff Daniels) from the English Dept at the University of San Francisco - "negligible literary value" for being a mere imitation of Whitman's Leaves of Grass; on the other side, claiming merit ("angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night") for the defense are Prof Mark Schorer (Treat Williams) of the University of California - "Sir, you can't translate poetry into prose" - and Luther Nichols (Alessandro Nivola), literary critic with the San Francisco Chronicle - an honest "howl of pain" that may survive the test of time, "permitting of poems of its type."

Following a summation to Judge Clayton Horn (Bob Balaban), who would rule on the case, by Ralph McIntosh (David Strathhairn), the prosecutor, emphasizing concern for the average person on the street coming into contact with such vulgar ideas, the defense attorney Jake Ehrlich (Jon Hamm) makes his closing remarks on censorship: "It is not for us to choose the words [for the poet] … There is in most of us the urge to make the world conform to our own views."

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Copyright © 2011 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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