BEFORE: I'm not sure this film has much to do with mothers, but hey, you never know.
Previous attempts to watch movies about the Beat Poets of the 1950's have been less than successful, so I don't know why I feel the need to watch JUST one more, but if this one isn't good, then really, never again. I really mean it this time.
Dane DeHaan carries over from "Dumb Money".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Howl" (Movie #3,867), "On the Road" (Movie #2,958)
THE PLOT: A murder in 1944 draws together the great poets of the beat generation: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs.
AFTER: Yes, I've done it again - this movie is accidentally relevant for two reasons. Allen Ginsberg's mother is a character here, and his relationship to her is a part of the main storyline. She is delusional and she thinks that her husband is holding her captive, and Allen is afraid to tell his parents that he's been accepted to Columbia University, for fear of his mother not being able to handle the separation. Everything seems fine when he goes to college, until there's a late-night phone call from his mother during which she begs him to come home, however he doesn't return to Paterson, NJ right away and instead goes out with his new friend Lucien Carr, and a few days later when he visits his parents he learns that his father has committed his mother to a mental hospital.
The second way this film is relevant right now is that it's set at Columbia, which is in the news lately for all the student protests against Israel's war with Palestine. And I'm sure it's JUST a coincidence that students suddenly developed a deep inner need to speak up for Palestinians, and it being just a few weeks before finals, well I'm SO sure that had nothing to do with it. But that's neither here nor there, because tonight's film is set in the closing years of World War II and I don't think there were a lot of students protesting that war in 1943, because most of the college-age men were either serving in the armed forces, or if they were lucky enough to be enrolled in college and not sitting in a trench in the Ardennes or facing enemy fire on Iwo Jima, then they probably considered themselves very lucky. It was a different time.
I've never heard of Lucien Carr, but he does seem to be a real person, he's got a Wikipedia page and everything. He met Allen Ginsberg at Columbia, but before that he'd been to many different schools across the country, and wherever he went, he was followed by David Kammerer, who was infatuated with him, today of course we would call this "stalking" or "grooming", because eventually he pursued him sexually and he was fourteen years older. Carr tried to commit suicide while attending the University of Chicago and learning that Kammerer had followed him there. After a two-week stay in the psychiatric ward of Cook County hospital, he moved to New York City, where his mother lived, and enrolled at Columbia.
And Kammerer was childhood friends with William S. Burroughs, which means that it was because of this psycho-stalker that Burroughs ended up knowing GInsberg, and the Carr dated Jack Kerouac, so really all these Beat Poets knew each other because of a couple gay relationships, which were kept secret for the most part during the 1940's, because again, it was a different time. Back then people also thought that if a son was abandoned by his father (as Carr was) that might turn him gay, because he'd always be seeking the love and approval from other men that he didn't get from his absent father. Or if a son was too emotionally attached to his mother (as Ginsberg was) that might also turn him gay. We know better in modern times, we now say that people are inherently gay and it's not a sexual preference, or even an orientation, it's a sexual identity, and people aren't made gay by their relationships, they're born that way. Again, different time, but isn't it all in how you look at it? Couldn't some people learn about being gay from other people who tell them about it or teach them how to love that way? I mean, we're all walking around this earth as a reflection of not just how we were born, but also what's happened to us along the way.
The four men - Ginsberg, Carr, Kerouac and Burroughs - have a fine time visiting West Village gay clubs and Harlem jazz clubs, and drinking and taking all sorts of drugs and feeling on top of the world, but then they realize that in order to become the poets of their generation, they're going to have to buckle down and actually write something, this is the difficult part of course. Quick, more drugs should help with this! It's just the matter of finding the right combination that will unlock their creative ideas, give them boundless energy but also not make their hearts explode at the same time, because it's that much harder to write poetry when you're dead. Don't worry, Burroughs seems to have the perfect drugs for every occasion.
The party comes to a crashing halt when Kammerer confronts Carr before he can join the Merchant Marine with Kerouac (there's a few good "seamen" jokes in there somewhere...) and Carr can't take any more of the dysfunctional relationship with Kammerer and all the stalking, so Carr kills him. Oops, Spoiler Alert. Ginsberg writes a deposition in Carr's defense, well he's written all of Carr's homework for him, so what's one more essay at that point? The essay, called "A Night in Question" also serves as Ginsberg's thesis assignment for his poetry/prose class, and it's so honest and raw and vulgar that it gets him expelled from Columbia. Seems about right. The professor dug it, so there's that at least.
Carr served 2 years for manslaughter, after that he worked as a copy boy for UPI, and worked his way up to an editorial position while the other three Beat Poets became famous. Burroughs and Kerouac were arrested as material witnesses, Burroughs was released on bail by his father and Kerouac was bailed out by Edie Parker's parents, after he agreed to marry their daughter. He then moved to Michigan and hated it so much he got the marriage annulled and left to go have the experiences that became the book "On the Road".
Ginsberg hooked up with a Barnard girl, but it didn't last and he soon moved out to San Francisco and published "Howl", then met his life partner Peter Orlovsky in 1954. They moved around a bit, to Paris, Morocco, India and London, got really into Buddhism and Krishna and drugs, of course. It was the 1960's, it was a different time. He died in 1997 and at least he led a very interesting life - I'm still not a fan of his poetry, however. But at least this is a decent film about the early days of those Beat Generation poets, and a true story, as far as I can tell.
Also starring Daniel Radcliffe (last seen in "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story"), Michael C. Hall (last seen in "In the Shadow of the Moon"), Jack Huston (last seen in "Earthquake Bird"), Ben Foster (last seen in "Hustle"), David Cross (last seen in "She's the Man"), Jennifer Jason Leigh (last seen in "Margot at the Wedding"), Elizabeth Olsen (last seen in"Wind River"), John Cullum (last seen in "Before We Go"), Erin Darke (last seen in "Two Days in New York"), Zach Appelman (last seen in "Like Father"), David Rasche (last seen in "Swallow"), Jon DeVries (last seen in "Fat Man and Little Boy"), Leslie Meisel, Nicole Signore, Michael Cavadias (last seen in "Wonder Boys"), Jonathan Cantor, Kyra Sedgwick (last seen in "Murder in the First"), Kevyn Settle, Brenda Wehle (last seen in "Let Me In"), Quinlan Corbett.
RATING: 5 out of 10 restricted books "liberated" from the library
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