ON THE ROAD

A fascinating film about immoral, self-centred, unlikeable people

People have been trying to film Jack Kerouac's semiautobiographical novel, the bible of the Beat Generation, for more than 50 years. Now at last it arrives as a multi-national coproduction, directed by Walter Salles, episodic, always interesting but never entirely engaging.

Mind you, it does help if you know who the main characters are supposed to be. The narrator Sal Paradise (Sam Riley) represents Kerouac himself. Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund) is Neal Cassady, who never actually achieved anything but was an icon of the Beat movement; Carlo Marx (Tom Sturridge) is the poet Allen Ginsberg; Old Bull Lee (Viggo Mortensen) represents the writer William S Burroughs and so on.

What Salles (director of The Motorcycle Diaries, chronicling Che Guevara's early travels) presents here is essentially a road movie as he follows the adventures of this group of young men and their women (mostly Cassady's women) on their frequent journeys across America in search of freedom, selfexpression and maybe the meaning of life.

To this end, though mostly penniless, they manage to sustain themselves through drink, drugs, jazz and lots of sex.

In a sense they are rebels against the post-war, early Cold War conformity of American society in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The fi lm captures the look and feel of the time very well but the political climate is hardly touched upon.

The central figure is the charismatic Dean, the quintessential beatnik and car thief. He is irresponsible, ruthlessly self-centred and, according to Old Bull, very possibly a psychopath. He is also utterly promiscuous.

At the start he is married to the 16-year-old Marylou (Kristen Stewart) but he betrays and abandons her, then marries (and betrays and abandons) Camille (Kirsten Dunst) and has an on-going affair with Carlo.

But he is revered by the others because he seems to regard life as an endless party, wandering off whenever the spirit moves him and invariably persuading Sal in particular to join him, both as participant in, and admiring observer of, his escapades.

Much of this is quite fascinating but the film's problem is that it never makes you feel involved with these people.

You wouldn't want to mix with them because they're not particularly likeable. They steal, they're immoral and amoral and they treat women badly. They think they're having a great time but there's a sense of desperation behind the fun. To the onlooker it all seems rather empty and meaningless.

The strongest emotion one can feel for them, particularly in the final meeting between the now grown-up Sal and the still beatnik Dean, is pity. What seems to be a celebration of youth and its excesses ends up as actually quite a sad story. (Although in real life these goings-on did at least enable Kerouac to break his writer's block and produce his novel.)

Of the cast, Hedlund makes a pretty good fi st of portraying Dean but it's the women, Dunst and Stewart, who come out best because they're the only ones for whom you can feel a real empathy.