A FRUSTRATED GENERATION FINDS A VOICE—AND THE SOUND IS HOWL
If you have never attended a poetry reading, now you have the chance. Howl, directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, is a poetry recitation, explication, exegesis, and deconstruction with graphic imagery unexcelled in film. The focus is Allen Ginsberg’s 75-cent, 26-page jeremiad Howl, which used the form of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to articulate something buried deep inside the psyche of young Americans after World War II. Prolix, complex, with sexual—and homosexual—imagery, the poem not only launched the Beat Generation but also occasioned perhaps the most memorable obscenity trial in American history. When the film begins, Allen Ginsberg (played by James Franco) is premiering the first lines of his poem at a San Francisco coffeehouse (Six Gallery) during 1955: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked . . . “ For those who did not experience the mood of the times, the ravages of the House Un-American Activities Committee enforcing a conformity that frightened academics in ivory towers, Hollywood screenwriters, trade-union leaders, and many others, the release of the film in 2010 speaks to an America cowed by fearmongers and bullied by mendacious rhetoriticians but yet enjoying the freedom that Ginsberg pursued as essential for establishing the self-worth of all who are different and seek truth. The film ends with credits explaining what happened to those involved in Ginsberg’s quest, including surviving City Lights proprietor Lawrence Ferlinghetti (played in the film by Andrew Rogers) and an aged Ginsberg singing one of his poems. What perhaps justifies superlatives is the 1957 trial, with publisher Ferlinghetti as the defendant, on the charge of obscenity. The arguments in the trial are presented by prosecutor Ralph McIntosh (played by David Strathairn) and defense counsel Jake Ehrlich (played by John Hamm). The Political Film Society has nominated Howl as best film on human rights of 2010. MH