On the Road

It emerged like music from the clat­ter­ing rhythm of a type­writer, a sym­pho­ny of tur­bu­lent youth and for­lorn adven­ture. But it moved to its own beat – the per­cus­sion of leather on grav­el. Jack Ker­ouac may have cap­tured a moment but he didn’t con­tain it. ​‘On the Road’ was the book that became a jour­ney, a rite of pas­sage for a gen­er­a­tion with their eyes on the hori­zon. It was the sto­ry that con­tin­ued to move. The rhythm that con­tin­ued to beat. But fainter and fainter.

Writ­ten in 1951 but only pub­lished six years lat­er, the book’s rela­tion­ship with its own era was nev­er straight­for­ward. Its suc­cess pre­cip­i­tat­ed Kerouac’s own decline, strip­ping him of the out­sider sta­tus that fuelled his work. Half a cen­tu­ry lat­er, it may still be part of the hip­ster trav­el bag, but age has turned its icon­o­clasm into some­thing more like nos­tal­gia, if not cliché.

Ker­ouac, of course, wasn’t the only fig­ure from the ​’60s coun­ter­cul­ture to find him­self absorbed by the estab­lish­ment he loathed. Che Gue­vara faced a sim­i­lar fate, which is why it makes sense that this long-delayed adap­ta­tion should fall to Wal­ter Salles, direc­tor of The Motor­cy­cle Diaries.

In ret­ro­spect, that account of Che’s ear­ly years looks like a prov­ing ground, a tem­plate even, for how to tack­le the sup­pos­ed­ly ​‘unfilmable’ nuances of Kerouac’s nov­el. But there are cru­cial dif­fer­ences. Where The Motor­cy­cle Diaries felt its way around the edges of Che’s life, infer­ring and fore­shad­ow­ing the events to come, ​‘On the Road’ is the sem­i­nal event of Kerouac’s career. The chal­lenge for Salles is to illu­mi­nate this sto­ry with­out fix­ing it, to cap­ture but not cage it with­in the dimen­sions of a cin­e­ma screen.

But for all the trag­ic grandeur of Gar­rett Hedlund’s Dean Mori­ar­ty, or the sun-blushed sex­u­al­i­ty of Kris­ten Stew­art (nev­er bet­ter than she is here), for all the sweat and youth and vital­i­ty bat­ter­ing against the screen, On the Road can nei­ther trans­port nor tran­scend. In strain­ing to fit the lim­i­ta­tions of cin­e­ma, it cuts Kerouac’s nov­el down to size, reduces what it attempts to immor­talise. But per­haps it human­is­es, too.

Mind­ful of Bull Lee’s reproach that ​‘trans­la­tion is trea­son’, Salles and his screen­writer Jose Rivera have adapt­ed ​‘On the Road’ with stud­ied rev­er­ence. It’s a kinet­ic thing, vivid and mus­cu­lar, that swings back and forth between San Fran­cis­co and New York, with inter­ludes in a Louisiana mad­house and a Mex­i­can brothel.

New York is home to Sal Par­adise (Sam Riley), a French-Cana­di­an writer who stands on the thresh­old of the 1950s with ​“the awful feel­ing that every­thing is dead”. He runs with a bohemi­an crowd of drunks and junkies, poets of dis­so­lu­tion like Car­lo Marx (Tom Stur­ridge), who ​“nev­er say or do an uncom­mon thing”, but dream of cre­at­ing a new world to house their alien­ation. They find inspi­ra­tion in Dean Moriarty.

Both prophet and par­a­site, his appetites dri­ve them out beyond the city, into Amer­i­ca, where Sal’s sto­ry drifts in the air cur­rents of Oldsmo­biles and flatbeds, in the com­pa­ny of grifters and migrants. There’s a loose nar­ra­tive about Dean’s infat­u­a­tion with the teenage Mary­lou (Stew­art), the way he picks her up and flicks her aside for a new sweet­heart, Camille (Kirsten Dun­st), then betrays her as well. How the pas­sion in Dean’s eyes is even­tu­al­ly shown to be some­thing clos­er to grief. How he slips away from Sal, too, and how youth slips away from them all.

And yet for all its lan­guorous melan­choly, On the Road is a cel­e­bra­tion of this imper­ma­nence. It’s a film of breath­less arrivals and swift depar­tures, of fleet­ing sex and doomed affairs. Sal, Dean and Mary­lou may be rac­ing towards self-destruc­tion, but they nev­er slow down. The world is per­ma­nent­ly in their rear-view mirror.

That doesn’t make Salles’ film a tra­di­tion­al road movie. On the Road isn’t about trav­el; it’s about life – the road is sim­ply the medi­um of Sal’s, and there­fore Kerouac’s, sto­ry. As the movie’s open­ing scene sug­gests, Ker­ouac expressed him­self in foot­steps, he wrote his life into the land­scape and punc­tu­at­ed it with the inter­sec­tion of oth­er lives, oth­er stories.

That makes the film patch­work and episod­ic, but it also makes On the Road a rich ensem­ble, with mem­o­rable cameos from Vig­go Mortensen as Old Bull Lee, Alice Bra­ga as a migrant labour­er, and Steve Busce­mi as an uptight trav­el­ling com­pan­ion who shares an eye-water­ing night with Dean.

So what is it about On the Road that falls short? That feels so… lim­it­ed? It’s part­ly that watch­ing some­body else’s trip is nev­er as fun as expe­ri­enc­ing it your­self. At some point in the wide-angled rush of land­scapes slip­ping by, the screen becomes a kind of pho­to­graph­ic slide, and Sal a monot­o­nous nar­ra­tor. There’s also the weary­ing sense that Sal and Car­lo aren’t quite as smart, quite as fun­ny, quite as fas­ci­nat­ing as they seem to find them­selves. And it doesn’t help that Sam Riley is so assid­u­ous­ly ​‘per­form­ing’ Kerouac’s voice, which results in much of his dia­logue sound­ing laboured.

There is, above all, a kind of numb­ing def­er­ence to Salles’ adap­ta­tion – a sense that On the Road has been fit­ted to the screen because it ought to be, not because it needs to be. And so the film quotes from Kerouac’s life and work with the same aca­d­e­m­ic dis­pas­sion that Sal and Dean dis­play towards Proust’s Swann’s Way, which accom­pa­nies them back and forth from coast to coast.

Dean quotes from the book at one point: ​“Why, what in the world should we care for if not our lives, the only gift the Lord nev­er offers us a sec­ond time.” But it’s hard to decide if these char­ac­ters are prof­li­gate or tru­ly blessed; believ­ers or apos­tates. Cer­tain­ly the women in their lives are both wor­shipped and reject­ed. What­ev­er the charms of Mary­lou or Camille, it’s nev­er enough to anchor their men, because they can’t extin­guish the fire that dri­ves them away and back again. So they’re left to deal with the grim real­i­ties that Dean leaves in the tracks of his departures.

Until, final­ly, this film and these peo­ple that burn, burn, burn sim­ply fiz­zle out. And you realise, as Sal buys a suit, says good­bye to Dean for the last time and sits in front of his Under­wood with a pack­et of cig­a­rettes and a bot­tle of whiskey, that this moment was over before Ker­ouac even set it down on paper. He was already writ­ing an obit­u­ary for some­thing the rest of the world didn’t even know had been born.

What does that make this ver­sion of On the Road? A memo­r­i­al, per­haps. A fit­ting mon­u­ment to some­thing passed, suit­ably solemn but absent its own spark of life. A film fixed irre­sistibly on its own rear-view mirror.