Road more traveled

In theaters Friday: 42, Scary Movie 5
On Blu-ray Tuesday: Hyde Park on Hudson

“I was a young writer trying to take off.” With this subtle, ironic confession, Jack Kerouac’s lyrical cipher Sal Paradise introduces himself in the long awaited screen adaptation of his iconic Beat Generation novel On the Road.

At last brought to screen, after decades of fits and starts, by producer Francis Ford Coppola and Brazilian director Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries), On the Road is, much like J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, a book that fans have alternately craved insatiably and piously resisted wanting to see on screen. How could it possibly live up to the hype with something close to what generations of readers have experienced while thumbing the pages of a uniquely revered work?

Following multiple mid-Century excursions across America, and one lost in the heart of Mexico, On the Road is a deceptively simple story. An introverted writer, Paradise, meets a raving wildcard named Dean Moriarty—based on Kerouac’s real-life friend and future Merry Prankster Neal Cassidy—and together they set out for adventure. So does the film deliver?

While he can’t hope to match the poetic majesty of Kerouac’s meter and connect-the-dots groove, Salles aims to humanize the figures that stand now larger than life after years of analysis and devotion. And he almost gets there, but falters by losing Paradise’s inspirational voice in the scrum for more of Moriarty’s hedonistic actions. Still, this adaptation rumbles and boils with a deadly energy. It’s a dark, impressionistic portrait of descent. The cast is a revolving door of performances that you can’t pull your eyes off of, but the effect is still grounded, plucked from the novel’s dreamy perch and molded with skin and blood and grease.

As Paradise, Sam Riley is all interior, dark-eyed brooding; Charlie Brown with a husky voice, whiskey in his veins and jazz in his bones. If Paradise and Moriarty are flip sides of the same coin, Garrett Hedlund is the fleshly, all-external id to Paradise’s suffering super-ego. Hedlund of course steals the film. He’s a blonde-haired specter; a live wire whose 10,000 volts of daring and disappointment for better and worse infuse a flaming wreckage of humanity to Kerouac’s more ecstatic, unbelievable superhero behind the wheel.

To its credit, rich supporting characters abound, led by Tom Sturridge’s long-suffering take on Carlo, representing a young, desperately ambitious Allen Ginsburg. No mere tag-along, Kristin Stewart’s Marylou is Moriarty’s young bride, and she leaves an impression deeper than her Twilight persona, pure heartbreak and lust for something just out of her reach. Though the great Elisabeth Moss is utilized a little too strikingly like her uptight and outspoken Peggy Olsen on Mad Men, Viggo Mortensen is revelatory as William S. Burrough’s stand-in Old Bull Lee and as his wife, Amy Adams is a mind-on-the-fritz knock out—for the one scene she’s in. These tastefully eccentric cameos weave a wide tapestry, but the film still belongs to Riley and Hedlund, locked in tension over their art, their friendship and their responsibilities in, as Kerouac puts it, this “too big world.”

With sweeping cinematography, On the Road is an admirable, but flawed take on an iconic story. Salles’ road through Kerouac’s “too big world” is the road to self. The horizon a dividing line not between earth and sky but aspiration and circumstance, body and soul. We all know a Dean Moriarty. Or perhaps we recognize the Dean inside of ourselves, that Dean long buried, faint and ghostly, or else the one still insatiable, clawing and piercing at our sides for any way out.