Does the upcoming Allen Ginsberg biopic need to be called Howl? (suggested better title: Love Poem On Theme By Whitman). And why is he being played by James Franco, an (admittedly excellent) actor who looks about as Jewish as Harry Osborn? The biopic premiered at Sundance today; expect the standard long national rollout and Oscar buzz (with a 10% chance of severe backfire) at the end of 2010. Here's a clip:
You will hopefully remember that David Cross played Ginsberg fairly recently in Todd Haynes' I'm Not There, and although similarly goyish, I thought he did a pretty good job. Or at least he had the look down, so the question has to be: can Franco rock the beard?
(Scene I'm most hoping will be dramatized [as if that is even needed]: Ginsberg vs. William F. Buckley on Firing Line).
It also has Todd Rotondi as Jack Kerouac and Andrew Rogers as Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In the annals of beat movies, will this be Naked Lunch or The Subterraneans? I'm surprised by how strongly this movie resembles hard boiled, low-budget noirs of the 50s, but that is no indicator of overall quality. The worst-case scenario is that we have another retro biopic in the most regressive sense of the word.
In other related news, Jay Farrar of Son Volt and Ben Gibbard of 500 Garden States of Elizabethtown have joined forces to release an album inspired by Kerouac's most unreadable book, Big Sur. Find out more about it here, but don't blame me if you find it a lot more compelling or enjoyable than the source material.
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