Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on September 2013

The conventional wisdom has been that Jack Kerouac’s rambling, episodic 1957 novel, a legendary bit of stream-of-consciousness that had a major impact on American literature, is unfilmable. Certainly exec producer Francis Ford Coppola must have thought so several times since he bought the film rights in 1979. If you funded 12 directors to adapt it, you’d probably get a dozen completely different movies. That said, this evocatively filmed take by Brazil’s Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) is surprisingly effective entertainment. Some scenes nicely capture the characters’ rebellious hunger for life, their wanderlust, their quest for self-discovery. But the overall tone is – how to say it? – a little on the sane side. The committed cast of Beat alter egos is very strong, notably Garrett Hedlund (Neal Cassidy), Sam Riley (Kerouac), and Kristen Stewart (Cassidy’s first wife, Marylou). The best parts, tellingly, are the voice-overs of Kerouac’s prose, which prompted me to pick up the book again. In fact, a perusal is highly recommended, given that one of the film’s weaknesses is the assumption that the viewer is intimately familiar with Kerouac and his work. And when you think about it, isn’t that the best way to deal with an unfilmable novel?