Although the filmmakers have made a conscious effort to play with different strands of the story-e.g., courtroom scenes are juxtaposed with images of Ginsberg’s earlier life, followed by animated sequences that accompany the poem itself being read for the first time-more thought and depth could have being given to the history of 1950s America. Only Ginsberg’s character is fleshed out. We are introduced to Neal Cassady, Kerouac, and Ferlinghetti, but they are not given any substantive lines, despite the fact that these were important Beat writers and personalities. Various names are dropped in the film, faces come and go, but the spectator is expected to know everyone. What is lacking, in this reviewer’s opinion, is more of the historic and social context. If, however, their intention was to make a work that served as wider commentary on the life and times of Ginsberg and his colleagues, then Howl falls short. If the creators of Howl merely aspired to make an intelligent and entertaining companion piece to the poem itself, they have succeeded.

Actor James Franco, a talented performer, portrays Ginsberg with appropriate vulnerability and sensitivity. In addition to the poem, which is read in its entirety, the filmmakers have included well-done animation and visceral computer-generated sequences. Howl, the recent film adaptation by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, is a non-linear work composed of three central elements: a black-and-white recreation of the poem’s debut at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on Octoa reenactment of the subsequent obscenity trial involving poet and editor Lawrence Ferlinghetti who published the poem and flashbacks to the writing process that produced the poem, with Ginsberg speaking to an unseen interviewer. They were painted as rebels who had done what they pleased in the repressed, monolithically conservative era known as the Eisenhower years. Burroughs ( Junkie) became icons of the Beat generation, and later, venerated figures in the burgeoning “counter-culture” of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Ginsberg and his contemporaries Jack Kerouac ( On the Road) and William S. The words speak evocatively and powerfully to the terrible political and social dilemmas of postwar America, those facing the younger generation in particular. Its opening lines, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by/ madness, starving hysterical naked,/ dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn/ looking for an angry fix,” are well-known and oft-quoted. In 1955 Allen Ginsberg composed an innovative poem in Berkeley, California entitled “Howl”. “All these books are published in Heaven.” Directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman

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