Fans of The Motorcycle Diaries were probably thrilled to hear that the same director, Walter Salles, had been hired to helm the project to finally bring one of the greatest road trip novels of all time to the silver screen. But On The Road, Jack Kerouac’s semi-autobiographical tale of friendship, wandering and debauchery, doesn’t translate nearly as well on screen, making it clear why it took Hollywood over 50 years to produce an adaptation.
The novel is based on Kerouac’s lost years spent wandering across America, keeping company with the likes of Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg (both of whom became icons of the Beat Generation), everybody high on literature and Benzedrine. Taking liberties with the plot, the film begins by introducing Sal Paradise (Kerouac’s alter-ego, played by Sam Riley), a struggling writer in search of inspiration—which soon arrives in the form of Dean Moriarty (based on Neal Cassady, played by Garrett Hedlund). With an insatiable appetite for life, revelry and women, Dean is larger-than-life, and everyone gravitates towards him like moths to a flame: his 16-year-old wife Marylou (props to Kristen Stewart for keeping the fidgeting under control), the lovelorn Carlo Marx (the stand-in for Allen Ginsberg, played by Tom Sturridge)—and Sal. Sal is soon hitchhiking from New York to Denver to meet Dean and the gang, so beginning the travels that take him from rowdy jazz clubs to cotton picking, to smoking cigarette butts salvaged off the sidewalk and back again. The lesson Sal finally learns is that everybody gets burned by Dean—including Dean himself.
Like the characters, the film wanders with no particular destination. While we appreciate the film’s disregard of the typical three-act structure, it fails to immerse the viewer as the novel does the reader. The images on screen don’t match the intensity of Kerouac’s rambling descriptions, and any insights into the complex (and well-played) characters sometimes seem to barely scratch the surface. In The Motorcycle Diaries, Salles may have made one of the greatest of road movies of all time, but that’s not the case with On The Road. Its 137 minutes give you the impression that the director lacks the requisite traveling experience to convey the real vibrancy of Kerouac’s words. Yet some of the performances are surprisingly strong, especially Garrett Hedlund’s portrayal of the puzzling contradiction that is Dean Moriarty. The period jazz scenes also provide a welcome dose of energy, but overall the film, though attractive, is just not electrifying enough—perfect evidence of why some novels are better left as words on the page.