ON THE ROAD (R) There's no getting around the cultural impact of Jack Kerouac's seminal Beat novel On the Road. Truman Capote famously lambasted Kerouac as a typist, not a writer. Only a fool would dismiss Kerouac so offhandedly. The novel is a gateway literary drug of doomed romance, unbridled longing for freedom and a Benzedrine-fueled search for open spaces. It's a post-World War II American odyssey of sex, drugs and jazz filtered through a Blakean anti-authoritarianism that embraces life in all its tangled beauty, heartache and rough poetry. On the Road was the secret America revealed, and it made Kerouac a superstar.   

Ever since the novel was published in 1957, filmmakers have attempted to bring its rambling, non-traditional structure to the big screen. Kerouac wanted Marlon Brando to star in an early version, and Francis Ford Coppola subsequently tried to direct his own take on it several times to no avail. Coppola eventually surrendered the project to Brazilian director Walter Salles (Central Station, The Motorcycle Diaries), a director with a firm grasp of conveying naturalism and authenticity through the otherwise distorted, seductive camera lens.

On the Road is too reverential to its source material to achieve greatness. Salles and screenwriter Jose Rivera nevertheless do what they can to shape a narrative out of Kerouac's wild, digressive, hyper-romantic road trip novel about angel-headed Kerouac stand-in Sal Paradise (Sam Riley) and his intense relationships with the impulsive, charismatic Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund) and Carlo Marx (Tom Sturridge), the latter based on poet Allen Ginsberg. Paradise is deeply attracted to Moriarty and the two travel the open roads of America with joy and foolhardiness, searching for true sensation and meaning in a culture that seems content with conformity. The movie, however, feels oddly stagnant when fixating on the debauched, low-rent lives of its characters in New York City. It picks up momentum, thankfully, when Paradise hits the road— hitching rides, working menial jobs picking cotton and scraping along hungry, broke and writing. Riley is perfect as Paradise. Hedlund is another story. He's capable as an actor and hunky, but there's a lack of fire in his performance that betrays the dangerous seduction needed for the role. Viggo Mortensen as Old Bull Lee (William S. Burroughs) easily steals the picture, subtly capturing the junkie priest's priceless intonation and cosmic hardboiled demeanor. On the Road levitates in those scenes, and we feel the lack when we abandon such detours.