Howl

Movie-makers can adapt novels and biographies into their audio-visual medium; can they do similar reincarnations for poetry? Ron Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman tried in 2010, taking Allen Ginsberg's Howl, a seminal Beat Generation poetic outburst, as the heart and soul of an unusual biopic. It was a drop-out's streams of mildly manic consciousness, a Whitmanesque statement for a modern jazz age.

Ginsberg was a natural topic for the noted indie writer-directors. Epstein (born 1955) was one of the documentary team which collated the 1977 G&L study, Word is Out. He's shared Oscars for other gay documentary features: Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989), on which Friedman worked, and The Times of Harvey Milk (1984). In 2000, he and Friedman dug up gay historical threads in Nazi Germany, Paragraph 175, which won them a Teddy at Berlin, where they'd won the same award for their 1995 examination of hidden homosexuality in Hollywood, The Celluloid Closet.

It can be safely assumed that New Jersey-born Ginsberg, like Milk, was a subject who appealed to their personal sensibilities: he (1926-1997) was another politically committed Jewish homosexual. His generation included William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and two bi-sexual writers who infatuated Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. Radical in politics and a liberal drug-user, Ginsberg also dabbled in heterosexuality prior to meeting his life-long love, Peter Orlovsky, the New York-born child of non-Jewish Russian immigrants. Ginsberg's fame, and notoriety, sprang from Howl, his largely autobiographical free-form commentary on US youth. Its major affront to contemporary society lay in its usage of coarse words and acknowledgement of gay sex, prompting the 1957 prosecution of Ginsberg's publisher for obscenity.

The biopic film takes the trial as its focal point, employing animations (to illustrate extracts from the poem), archive footage and an exceptional cast to recreate scenes from the trial and the poet's life. James Franco, as Ginsberg, is the movie's linchpin, appearing clean-shaven in B&W for the initial reading of the poem at an adulatory writer's gathering in San Francisco in 1955, and in bearded colour to cite passages from a lengthy taped interview conducted at the time of the trial. Franco is surely more handsome and socially attractive than Ginsberg, who probably turned in glee in his grave.

The film project attracted other top talents. David Strathairn is the dutiful public prosecutor, Jon Hamm the straightforward defence attorney, Jeff Daniels a dismissive English professor, Bob Balaban the calm judge acquitting the publisher. Their statements are all taken verbatim from the official records, ensuring that the movie ends up looking and feeling like a documentary with recreations, as it is, rather than a less reliable docudrama.

Perhaps unfortunately, the directors' reputation for documentary integrity resulted in stilted courtroom scenes featuring a host of extras pretending to be rapt attendees, as artificially focused as the audience at the poem's reading. Similarly, the intellectual clarity and earnest tone employed for Franco's recreation of the interview are too good to be totally credible.

The prosecutor suggested that ordinary readers like him might think the poem was "sensitive bullshit". The documentary's audience might think the same. Howl was over-ambitious, a ponderous attempt by the pair of film-makers to do something more challenging and mainstream in their documentary work.

It had only a few festival nominations, and a couple of wins (one for Franco). Their next co-direction (2011) has a key change of emphasis: a biopic of porn star Linda (Deep Throat) Lovelace, who became a feminist anti-porn campaigner. They hoped to cast Franco as her exploitative photographer husband.