
The actor
James Franco channels poet
Allen Ginsberg in
Howl, the part animation, part courtroom drama, part period piece about the creation of the iconic beat poem and the censorship trial for obscenity that followed its 1956 City Lights publication. Having filled the prestigious slot of opening night film at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Howl was featured this week at
NewFest, premiering in New York at the 22 year old lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender film festival--appropriately so, as every kind of sex is openly rejoiced in this iconic poem, written at a dire time comedian Richard Pryor dubbed “the great pussy drought.”
Howl, unusual for a film, delves deeply into the poem's language evoking taboo images of a subterranean realm of sex, drugs and jazz, and effectively conveys the arguments critics had to make in defense of the poem's redeeming human values, and America's first amendment rights at large. The actual trial transcripts supply the dialogue, comic in today's world.
Thus focused, Howl avoids the biography of the poet. And so spends little screen time on
Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg's life partner who died this week of lung cancer, and who was buried on June 3, Allen Ginsberg's birthday. Peter Orlovsky penned the poetry volume, Clean Asshole Poems and Smiling Vegetable Songs, encouraged by Ginsberg to write.
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