In every interview I’ve seen of Allen Ginsberg – and if you’re interested in documentaries on 20th Century literature and/or Bob Dylan, you’ve seen a lot – there’s always a level of performance, a sense that Ginsberg’s playing himself. Some of the tics and mannerisms that arose from his innate nebbishness are amplified into a sort of performance art. There’s some sense that Ginsberg was reclaiming these odd vocal cadences, unusual word emphases, and random interjections of “mmmhmmm” from the target of mocking into a sort of trademark.
Appropriately, Ginsberg is portrayed in the new film Howl by James Franco, whose recent career has been devoted to playing the role of “James Franco.” From his forays into modern art, to spending a year as “Franco” on the soap opera General Hospital, to racking up an absurd amount of graduate literature degrees, Franco shows himself eager to wrap his Hollywood persona in air-quotes. Even at the pre-premiere screening of Howl that I attended in September, Franco seemed to be playing an exaggerated version of the Hollywood-star-slash-artistic-genius: arriving late, shifting in his seat, never quite giving a straight answer but still charming the audience all the while. As with Ginsberg, it’s difficult to discern the line between the “real” Franco and the “stage” Franco, or whether there is even a line at all.
It’s no surprise that a role that allows Franco to explore his fascination with self-awareness ends up not only becoming the best performance of his career, but also the best thing about the movie. Like Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote, Franco transcends physical dissimilarities (in this case, being far better looking than the real Ginsberg) to create an emotionally authentic portrait. Even in well-done biopics, the conscious mind can still easily separate the actor from the real-life figure. Howl, on the other hand, seems to center around a strange Franco-Ginsberg hybrid. Obviously, it’s not the actual Allen Ginsberg, who died over a decade ago, but it doesn’t quite seem to be James Franco, movie star, either. Franco has Ginsberg’s speech patterns down pat, but this isn’t Ray-style mimicry. It’s the sort of performance that comes from understanding the fluidity of identity – how easy it is to become someone else, even if that someone else is yourself.
The film itself is a collage of four different vignettes: Ginsberg’s first reading of Howl in 1955, shot in black and white; a blue-tinted interview with Ginsberg that takes place two years later; the 1957 obscenity trial of Howl & Other Poems publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti; and an animated sequence illustrating the poem itself. Howl is directed by documentary directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, whose past films include The Celluloid Closet and The Times of Harvey Milk. The resulting film, albeit fictional, leans hard on the conventions of the documentary. Real photographs are intermixed with the actors’ recreations of familiar images. Characters are introduced with subtitles listing their names and occupations. Verbatim excerpts from the Ferlinghetti trial and interviews with Ginsberg form the basis of the script. It’s as if Epstein and Friedman wanted to make a documentary, but lacking actual courtroom footage, reconstructed their own. The result is a bit distracting. The subtitle may read, “Jake Erlich, defense attorney,” but your brain protests that it’s “Jon Hamm, mad man.”
Of the four segments, the strongest are the ones that focus on Franco as Ginsberg. Maybe the best is the 1957 interview, which also happens to be the most fictionalized. (The Life magazine interview it was based on was never published and has since been lost.) There, Franco/Ginsberg addresses an unseen interviewer and talks about the creation of the poem and interprets some of the symbolism. These segments also include flashbacks to the events in Ginsberg’s life that inspired Howl, from his time in a mental institution to befriending Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. Franco/Ginsberg’s 1955 reading of Howl, while also strong, falters a bit by cutting to the reactions of the cheering beatniks in attendance. While the motive may have been to show the poem’s instant status as definition of a subculture, it instead reminded me of why Jonathan Demme was a genius not to show the audience in Stop Making Sense.
The courtroom scenes, where Franco/Ginsberg is absent, come the closest to standard biopic fare. Despite a number of welcome actors, the scenes are undercut by a somewhat simplistic take on the proceedings. The opponents to Howl are treated as one-dimensional figures not hip enough to get the poem. Grace Potter (Mary-Louise Parker) smirks in disgust at the poem’s content; ADA Ralph McIntosh (David Strathairn) homes in on the most lurid phrases; Professor David Kirk (Jeff Daniels) talks in circles about the poem’s lack of literary merit. A film that would have given serious weight to both sides of the obscenity issue would have been more compelling. Judge Clayton Horn (Bob Balaban) was conservative and deeply religious, yet he recognized Howl’s worth and ruled in its favor. I wish the filmmakers would have trusted the audience to do likewise.
However, the biggest misstep is the animation. At the screening I attended, Epstein and Friedman discussed how they wanted the film to be a “poemopic”: that is, focused on Howl rather than Ginsberg. In assembling the film, they decided on using animation based on Eric Drooker’s Illustrated Poems collaboration with Ginsberg to illuminate the poem’s content. In theory, this is not a bad idea. But once the first animated sequence began, I had to suppress a grimace. When I discovered Howl at age 14 on the shelf of my public library, what intrigued me was its earthiness: the dark, gritty descriptions wrapped in syncopated meters; the beauty that arose from simple, ugly words. This was a poem told in black and white and endless grays, of people slouching toward nonexistence. The animation in Howl, however, is dynamic, ethereal – these are not minds destroyed by madness, but liberated by it. Howl the poem becomes a celebration rather than a lamentation. It’s most useful in the “Moloch” segment, where it’s unafraid to make some metaphorical leaps. Otherwise, it verges on the redundant, simply showing a literal interpretation of Ginsberg’s words.
While I have a number of criticisms Howl the film, though, I still recommend it. The subject matter is certainly worthwhile. The editing weaves through the fractured chronology with sense and electricity. While the pseudodocumentary style isn’t entirely successful, it’s nevertheless a noble attempt at creating a different type of docudrama. And above all, there’s James Franco’s disappearing act, the year’s best performance that won’t be nominated for an Oscar. Howl as a film does little to illuminate its namesake poem. But Franco’s performance is the closest thing to revealing the artist, trickster, yearner behind the Allen Ginsberg mask.
Look, Sally, Look 