"HOWL" — ★★1/2 — Jame Franco, Jon Hamm, David Straithairn, Jeff Daniels; unrated but probable R (vulgarity, sexual cartoon imagery); Broadway
"Howl" isn't an art film; it's four of them. It's a quadruple-scoop sundae, melding artist's biography, poetry slam, First Amendment debate and "Fantasia" for English majors.
It's partly the story of young Beat writer Allen Ginsberg (James Franco). Conflicted about his identity as a gay man, he comes alive dropping poetic bombshells on appreciative hipsters. This section plays like gritty performance art, as Franco chants his epic poem "Howl" in a crowded San Francisco art gallery.
Then there is the courtroom drama of the 1957 trial after the poem's publisher was arrested for promoting obscenity. Jon Hamm plays a shrewd attorney defending free expression against a prim prosecutor (David Straithairn) and the conformist fuddy-duddies of the literary establishment (Jeff Daniels and Mary-Louise Parker among them).
Another segment sets "Howl's" spoken verses to hallucinatory animation. The film works these sections into a jazz-beat collage of dramatized depositions, re-created interviews and erotic/surrealist cartoons.
The co-directors, Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein, Oscar-winning documentarians on their first foray into fiction, struggle to find a proper form for their narrative. The overall effect is a sort of visual/conceptual ADD. If you get bored, hang on a minute; the film will veer off in a new direction.
To start with what's right about the movie, Franco makes a swell Ginsberg. He gets the shy, burning intelligence and the cadence of the poet's speech just right, whether he's declaiming onstage or in a faux interview, answering questions posed by an off-screen interlocutor. Half the courtroom scenes, verbatim trial transcripts, are dizzy comedy. With Straithairn's prosecutor counting four-letter words and Daniels' cross-examination dissolving into screwball literary theory, the proceedings approach pure lunacy.
As for the problems, where to begin? Many actors playing major characters in Ginsberg's life — Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Ginsberg's longtime lover Peter Orlovsky and his courageous publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti — never speak a word. The fact-based dramatization of the censorship trial doesn't add up dramatically; Ginsberg never attended the hearing, and there's no ringing summation to the jury for us to cheer.
Worst of all is the animation. The look is anachronistic, more 1980s MTV than anything that would have come from "Howl's" cultural moment. And the images reduce the poem by literalizing it. The passage about wanderers "who walked all night with their shoes full of blood" gives us, yes, snow and crimson footprints. The Moloch stanzas are Fritz Lang-lite, and the campy image of a motorcycle revving through a polymorphous forest of phalluses is haunting, but not in a good way.
Berkeley lit professor Mark Schorer (Treat Williams) makes the point when he tells the district attorney, "Sir, you can't translate poetry into prose. That's why it's poetry."
You can't convert poetry into pictures, either (unless you're Jean Cocteau or William Blake). The filmmaker's credo is "Show, don't tell," and the poet's is the opposite.
"Howl" is intelligent, well-intentioned and ultimately lifeless: The Half-Dead Poets Society.
"Howl" is not rated but would probably receive an R for vulgarity and sexual catoon imagery; running time: 86 minutes