Howl

The film braids three things. The first is the night in 1955 when Allen Ginsberg read Howl for the first time in San Francisco. The second is the 1957 obscenity trial of the poem's publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The third is an interview in which Ginsberg talks about his life, about Carl Solomon and about his mother. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman direct. James Franco plays Ginsberg, with Jon Hamm, David Strathairn, Bob Balaban and Mary-Louise Parker in the courtroom. Most of the dialogue was not written. The trial passages come from the transcripts and the interview from Ginsberg's published conversations. For the readings, an animated sequence was built from the drawings of Eric Drooker, who had worked with Ginsberg and illustrated his books. It premiered at Sundance in 2010. The directors had already won documentary Oscars for The Times of Harvey Milk and Common Threads; this was their first fiction feature, and their refusal to leave documentary method behind is both its strength and its limit. Who it is for: anyone interested in the Beats, in poetry, and in censorship trials. Who it is not for: viewers expecting a conventional biography. The film does not tell a story. It sets three textures side by side and works on the tension between them.